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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



LIFE AS EEALITY 
A PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAY 



BY 




ARTHUR S. DEWING 


, Ph.D. 


Harvard University 




Philosophy. 


Introduction to the History of Modern 


Philosophy .... 


Philadelphia 


Life as Reality . 


New York 


Pedagogy. 




Chemistry Notebook . 


Boston 


Botany Notebook 


Boston 


Zoology Notebook 


Boston 


Physiology Notebook . 


Boston 


[Designed to teach by vigorous 
inductive method of la- 
boratory work.] 



LIFE AS REALITY 

A PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAY 



BY 
ARTHUK STONE DEWING 



LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 

FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK 

LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 

1910 









Copyright, 1910 

BY 

ARTHUR S. DEWING 



THE SCIENTIFIC PRESS 

ROBERT DRUMMOND AND COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



GLA265218 



TO 

WHO FIRST TAUGHT MB 
TO LOOK FOR REALITY 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. Life and Nature 1 

II. Experience and the Realist .... 18 

III. Science and her Laws 37 

IV. The Law of Life 60 

V. The Call of the Whole . . . . . 84 

VI. Religion 106 

VII. Truth 124 

VIII. Life as Reality 148 

IX. The One in Many 170 

X. The Many in One 191 

vii 



FOREWORD 

Some years ago I was asked by a friend, while 
we were climbing old Kearsarge, to defend a 
system of idealism which gave full value to the 
will-strivings of our life-interests without degen- 
erating into crude individualism. That reality 
could be denned in some such terms had been 
my thesis, — and it is the thesis of the present 
essay. This little incident occurred several years 
ago, but in the intervening time, while struggling 
to make myself clear, I have become the more 
convinced than ever that reality, for us human 
beings, is revealed directly through the impulses, 
the strivings, the purposes of our life and only 
indirectly through the vast world of objects and 
facts that pass in ceaseless stream before the 
eye of consciousness. It is in the effort and not 
at the goal that we must search for the real. 

I have followed the method of trial and error 
in this search. After stating the problem of 
the final reality in the opening chapter, I have 

inquired what the material world and science 

ix 



x FOREWORD 

have to offer by way of solution. Later the 
problem shifts to the realm of the moral law, to 
society, to the religious experience, and to the 
various conceptions of philosophic truth. In all 
these spheres of relative value, we find that the 
underlying reality is revealed in the self-expres- 
sion of life. In the eighth chapter, "Life as 
Reality," — the crux of the book, — I have striven 
to state my main contention. The last two 
chapters show the application of this main 
thesis of the "one" of philosophy, and to the 
"many" of our practical, everyday life. To 
the whole idealistic trend of our modern world, 
my debt is obvious, most especially, I presume, 
to the imperial genius of Kant. 

Cambridge, 
February 13, 1910. 



LIFE AS REALITY 



LIFE AND NATURE 

The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life. 

— Byron 

It is natural for the human mind to seek 
for ultimate reasons. Our ordinary, everyday 
activities require that we reach some working 
understanding of what our life means to us. 
We believe in the existence of the objects of 
sense experience; we believe in the existence 
of our own consciousness, and we have an almost 
involuntary belief in the existence of great 
moral forces in our world. We hold to these 
simple faiths without ordinarily admitting them 
to any more critical analysis than is given in 
everyday experience. Yet with all this simple 
assurance in the elementary beliefs, there comes 
a time when either of our own wish or by force 
of circumstance we must subject them to criti- 



2 LIFE AS REALITY 

cism. At this point the problem of reality 
presses forward. We want to know whether 
our sense-world is ultimately real, or only a 
modification of consciousness; we want to know 
in what sense our own moral life has a place in 
the order of the world, and to what extent it 
squares with the final value of the universe. 
Religion, too, pushes forward its own questions. 
We are outgrowing the time-honored dogmas of 
our fathers and blazing out new paths of our own 
through a wilderness of doubt and criticism. 
Here we must have a firm understanding of the 
true values of the religious consciousness in order 
to distinguish what is permanent in religion 
from what is only temporary. All these and a 
thousand other questions of daily moment require 
that we straightway face the problem of reality 
and determine what is ultimate in the varied 
wealth of our experience. 

In the truest sense we are all philosophers. 
We can never close our eyes to the world in which 
we are living. We are all like Kasselas: whether 
we would or not, we must go forth into a living 
world and meet the issues of a living reality 
face to face. Hume preferred to play back- 
gammon beside his huge kitchen fireplace than 



LIFE AND NATURE 3 

to amuse himself with his own speculation, and 
the record of some human achievement appealed 
to him far more than the subtleties of cause and 
effect. Life cannot be interpreted as a fixed 
mould into which our experiences fall with a kind 
of predetermined certainty. Reality comes only 
through actual living. Experiences are nothing, 
moral efforts count for nothing, religious aspira- 
tions signify nothing except as they have a depth 
of reality to the conscious being who knows 
and feels them. 

This search for a final truth in our world is a 
vital question notwithstanding the sophistry of 
logic into which it often degenerates. All that 
we attend to, all that interests us, all that we 
hope and pray for, is built upon the assumption 
that we believe something in the universe is 
real. We feel that this reality is intimately 
associated with our actual lives, either as the 
values of our moral, social, or religious con- 
sciousness, or as the material world of external 
experience. We believe in our inner life and 
we believe in outer nature. These two truths 
stand out clearly. One is the simple unquestioned 
reality of our own consciousness, the inextinguish- 



4 LIFE AS REALITY 

able belief that we as conscious beings think and 
feel and stand for some value in the universe. 
The other truth is nature, — the belief in the 
reality of the vast world of material objects 
lying outside our own consciousness but some- 
how akin to it. Life is personal, in the truest 
sense individual. Nature is impersonal, in the 
truest sense universal. Life is grasped immedi- 
ately through activity, through feeling; life is 
life only so far as it is lived. Nature is known 
only by means of the senses; it has a far-away 
character, a sort of impersonal fixity never to 
be confused with the inner feeling of life. 

These two realms of reality, life and nature, 
appear mutually exclusive, — we cannot live nature 
nor observe life through the senses. We cannot 
even know of the universe that surges about us 
except through the indirect testimony of external 
experience. Nor, on the other hand, can we 
sense life itself as a living reality. We cannot 
measure it by objective standards and compress 
it into the sense-forms of our own objective 
experience. Life leads us within to our own 
personal feelings, to the very font of our beings; 
nature leads us without to the clearly defined 
world of sense experience. There can be no 



LIFE AND NATURE 5 

confusion between the two, because the contrast 
is as deep and fundamental as anything within 
the grasp of our minds. 

This contrast between life and nature is 
directly revealed in consciousness. Life is a 
matter of value; nature is a matter of fact. 
Life means to the living personality a continual 
testing of things done and things undone, of 
successes and of failures, of efforts, struggles and 
ideals. Life stands as a symbol for all this 
wealth of subjective imagery, for the inner 
meaning of what we only vaguely feel. The 
problem of nature is not one of values, it is one 
of fact. Sense experience carries with it a blind 
certainty and the facts of nature come to us with 
the stubborn resistance of a reality alien to our 
own consciousness. They must be accepted as 
true in our understanding of the world that 
surrounds us. This certainty is the first pre- 
supposition of the natural sciences. 

Different periods of the world's history have 
emphasized either one or the other of these two 
problems. Human speculation resembles the 
swing of a huge pendulum, — one age worships 
subjective life, another objective nature. The 
old bards of the Vedic hymns far away in an 



6 LIFE AS REALITY 

unknown land saw, with a prophetic vision, the 
problem of the world as a problem of life. They 
were the first idealists. Their voice resounds 
through the centuries, — the world of reality is 
within, it is life. In the ancient city of Miletus, 
rich and opulent, where the wealth of Persia and 
the industry of the Ionian Greeks met, Thales 
first taught a philosophy of material reality. 
The beginning and the end of all things is water; 
this, of all the world, is real. Great wealth fos- 
ters a belief in the final reality of nature because 
then men look for human values in the material 
stimulus rather than in the subjective satisfaction. 
But this passes away. A century or so later the 
philosophy of nature of the early Greeks was 
replaced by the philosophy of mind of Anax- 
agoras and Plato. The Greek genius had tested 
the reality of the material world and found it 
dependent on the flux, of human consciousness. 
It craved the reality that is centered in man. 
The rhythmic pulse of human thought vacillates 
between a philosophy of nature and a philosophy 
of life. 

But now our own age is naturalistic. We 
have learned through practical tests to gauge 
our knowledge by our conquest over natural 



LIFE AND NATURE 7 

forces. We have little interest in understanding 
the springs and currents of human values. These 
are too subtle, too little capable of practical 
reckoning to interest a materialistic age. Science 
has taught us to seek for truth beyond con- 
sciousness. It has taught us to objectify truths 
It would even throw life on a screen and lead us 
to mistake the image for the reality, the centro- 
somes and the lines of amphiaster for the living 
protoplasm. Our immediate interests make 
science the revelation of God to man. 

Judging from its practical results, science is 
worthy of this confidence. It has harnessed 
natural forces, predicted the complex phenomena 
of wind and storm; it has read the composition 
of distant stars and measured the energy of the 
electron. Upward of a hundred years ago one 
of the most eminent scientists of modern times 
prophesied that chemistry would never be a 
true science because its facts could not be corre- 
lated with mathematics. To-day chemistry is in 
the forefront of the physical sciences and it has 
long since learned to predict its phenomena with 
mathematical accuracy. A few years ago the 
principles of inheritance were as mysterious as 
ever; to-day they are unfolding their secrets to 



8 LIFE AS REALITY 

the pupils of Mendel and Darwin. All this is 
true, but it is not all. 

We call our age practical because it idealizes the 
material or else materializes life. We interpret 
the conquest of science over our physical environ- 
ment as if in the problem of nature lay the 
problem of reality. We have drawn the vitality 
out of life in order to measure its world. But 
it is not so simple as we would make it, because 
the whole of reality is not exhausted by our 
knowledge of nature. The things for which 
men and society have sought and struggled 
for are not the things of scientific moment. On 
the contrary, they are the intangible principles of 
life and liberty, of moral vigor and religious 
fervor, which cannot be materialized into facts 
and formulas. They are real, notwithstanding, 
and the world is dead without them. Even our 
practical age must give to the values of life their 
place in reality, for the problem of reality is a 
problem of poise. It is psychologically a balance 
between the impulse to interpret life in terms of 
nature and the impulse to interpret nature in 
terms of life. Logically it is a balance of ulti- 
mate principles of reason. In either case it is 
first a problem of value, the value of life in the 



LIFE AND NATURE 9 

mechanism of nature and of nature in the reality 
of life. 



The materialism of our modern world may have 
accomplished much. It has not, however, under- 
stood the significance of its own achievements 
because it has not seen that the reality of nature 
is borrowed from life, which alone is real. 
Centuries ago Socrates plead with the youth of 
Athens to forsake the vain search for a material 
universal and find first the universal of conscious- 
ness and life. Nature is forever external to us, 
life and the moral world are close at hand. The 
old Greek saw a chaos of conflicting opinions 
struggling for vantage ground. He saw men 
looking for wisdom outside of themselves, when 
the true wisdom lies in life. Socrates did not 
appreciate, perhaps, the wonderful future that 
lay in store for the physical sciences, but he saw 
clearly that men must understand themselves 
before they understand their world. And to-day, 
notwithstanding the achievements of the sciences, 
the reality of the inner world of life is as certain 
as when the grand old man taught it to his 
faithful pupils in the prison opposite the Areop- 



10 LIFE AS REALITY 

agus. Science has changed since Socrates lived, 
but his philosophy of life has not. 

Science can give us no insight into that life 
which to understand we must feel. The object- 
world of fact and certainty, of law and order, 
has a borrowed kind of reality; it is this that 
furnishes the inspiration and the limitations of 
science. The inner world of life activity has its 
truer values. It can never come within the range 
of scientific observation for the simple reason 
that it can never be objectified. It cannot even 
be described, for description can deal only with 
what can be portrayed to another, and life as 
a living reality can be known only as it is lived. 
Science can never instill into her clear-cut 
formulas the intimacy and the vitality which 
makes the experience real to the human being 
that experiences. Her ghostly forms of a dead 
reality can neither think nor speak; they can 
only express the outer shell of what was, never 
the living germ of what is. At best they are the 
protoplasm congealed, the ashes of the fire 
quenched. 

Here lies the difficulty of all our human specu- 
lation. The reality which we want to express 
because it is the reality within our own conscious- 



LIFE AND NATURE 11 

ness is not the reality which we actually do 
express by any means within our power. The 
world of external sense-experience and formal 
law is not the deeply felt reality of our own life. 
The value worth knowing is this reality of life, 
but no sooner does it become articulate than it 
loses its vital character and shrinks into the 
dead images of objective experience. We try 
to hold to the reality of our life. But in trying to 
express this it fades away and something else 
looms up in its stead. We know what reality 
is, but we cannot make another feel what we 
mean by it. We cannot throw it into the forms 
with which we are accustomed to deal with our 
sense images. Nor, on the other hand, can we 
bring science up to the level of life, in spite of 
the rude efforts of the psychical and the social 
sciences. It is here that such subjects as psy- 
chology and sociology fail in their endeavor to 
explain vital processes. They may construct 
laws, they may theorize regarding the psycho- 
physical parallelism or the structure of conscious- 
ness or a thousand other things, but these have 
at most merely an academic interest. They 
remain forever objective to our consciousness; 
they never make us feel that they are concerned 



12 LIFE AS REALITY 

with, something real and vital to us. They do 
not bridge the chasm; they do not explain one 
syllable of life as a living reality. 

Science fails to express more than an objective 
copy. Literature and art believe they can strike 
nearer home. Literature seeks to portray some 
phase of the multiform variety of human feeling, 
its strivings, its passions, its ideals, but at best 
these are always interpretations of what can- 
not be made articulate and recorded on paper. 
Lady Macbeth, Othello and Lear may speak in 
the words of Shakespeare's genius, but they are 
dead unless their emotions are understood in 
terms of what life means to every one of us. 
Literature does not give us a living reality, it 
merely supplies the rough clay into which we 
breathe the vital spark. And other arts, like 
painting and sculpture, do no better. They see 
the emotional striving for a finished perfection 
and seek to embody this in a form appreciable 
to sense experience, but find that the living spirit 
has vanished as soon as the object of art is 
created. They can give us, it is true, the vague 
shadows of a living reality, but these shadows 
reach no nearer the fountainhead of art's inspira- 
tion than the dead formulas of science. As a 



LIFE AND NATURE 13 

whole, art fails even worse than science, because 
its error is more subtly veiled. Science advances 
no claim of omniscience; it would include only 
nature. What cannot be expressed as object it 
passes over knowing full well that there is a kind 
of truth it may not touch without blighting. 
But art, vain, fervid, impulsive, rushes into the 
innermost recesses of life. It would grasp the 
secret and transfigure it into some permanent 
form of reality. But the congealed life which it 
brings forth to the light of day is as dead and 
essentially meaningless as the crude and imperfect 
descriptions of science. In no way have either 
art or science succeeded in bridging the chasm 
between life and nature. Yet the bridge must 
be crossed, else life and nature are nothing to 
one another. 



If the mere statement of a problem is all that 
is demanded for its understanding, then the 
contrast between life and nature has brought 
into the foreground as deep and permanent a 
problem as our human powers may hope to grasp. 
But the statement of the contrast is not enough. 
Our mind revolts at any chasm between the two 



14 LIFE AS REALITY 

fields of reality. We demand with a childish 
feverishness that our universe be a true universe. 
We want to know and to understand the relations 
which seem to subsist between life and nature. 
Moreover, we revolt at any inordinately com- 
plex and subtle theory of metaphysics. Life 
and the experiences of nature lie close at hand. 
There is nothing more directly certain than these 
two great realities, — why, then, refer them back 
to some unknown cause veiled in the obscurity 
of metaphysical dialectic? The philosophy of 
our modern world is simple, almost childish; it 
is akin to the animism of the old savage who 
saw himself in the great soul of nature. We have 
outgrown, perhaps unfortunately, the figurative 
play of his imagination, but we have not out- 
grown the utter simplicity of his philosophy. 
We want the most direct means for understand- 
ing life and nature, because life and nature are 
themselves so simple and so immediate. 

No end is achieved by inventing some supreme 
universal, neither life nor nature, where all con- 
trasts are obliterated in a vague, gray indifference. 
The fashion of philosophy and theology to ex- 
plain the known facts of consciousness by some 
unknown principle of universal reality leads 



LIFE AND NATURE 15 

only to confusion. The Infinite Being of Par- 
menides, the Mystic One of Plotinus, the God of 
Erigina, the Substance of Spinoza, the Absolute 
Indifference of Schelling, and the Unknowable 
of Spenfer are all alike in their unintelligibihty. 
Under different names, among different peoples 
the old fascination for explaining the known by 
the unknown has occurred and reoccurred. But 
yet these Absolutes, one and all, either have 
meaning to our consciousness, in which case they 
are part of the interests of our life, or else they 
mean nothing and are no more than words, mere 
words signifying nothing. The Absolute, or 
whatever else we call reality, must be intimately 
related to life and to the human experience of 
external nature, because such a conception exists 
solely to make life and nature clearer. The 
Supreme Mystic One has no significance as a 
background of reality simply because it occupies 
so exalted a place that the everyday facts of 
our mind cannot reach it. We are compelled 
to interpret reality by the simple evidence of 
our own human consciousness. What is either 
so individual or so subtle as to claim for itself 
a place beyond life and nature can have no place 
in reality. Bather is it true that unless God or 



16 LIFE AS REALITY 

any other conception of ultimate reality can meet 
the values of human appreciation, unless it can 
be interpreted to our mind, it is in no sense real. 

"Man is the measure of all things" has rung 
through the ages, an echo of what was taught 
along the banks of the Ilissus. But man's meas- 
ure of things is relative and not absolute; the 
very purposes by which he would measure his 
"all things" are themselves measured. They 
are relative. He looks out upon the world of 
material objects, that he believes himself able 
to pattern after his own mind; he would shape 
dead nature into a living image of himself. True, 
he does it; but is he himself not a part of what 
is shaped? Must we not go deeper than the 
external form of our ordinary purposes and 
efforts to discover reality? All the experiences 
which press upon consciousness, and all the 
struggles and moral purposes of life make us 
believe that there is a reality somewhere. This 
is the lesson of modern idealism, but it is only half 
the truth. The rest consists in finding what 
this reality is. 

Life and the experience of external nature are 
known to us in terms of our human consciousness. 
Whatever is real, whatever has significance, is 



LIFE AND NATURE 17 

reflected there, for out of human consciousness 
in some form must come that which is real to us 
human beings. The untold richness through 
which the life which is lived and the nature which 
is known are borne into human consciousness, 
is not without depth and purpose. We demand 
a reason for ourselves and for our world. Many 
are the possibilities which rise into the foreground, 
many are the efforts to establish the reality of 
life and nature on a permanent foundation. 
We shall examine each in its turn. Sense- 
experience, science, happiness, the moral law, 
society, and religion each has its claim, each has 
its contribution to offer to the totality of human 
values, each believes itself the final reality in 
a universe of law and purposes. Beneath and 
beyond all stands the reality of life. 



II 

EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 

To Truth's house there is a single door 
Which is experience. 

— Bayard Taylor 

The reality of nature is revealed to us through 
sense experience. If, therefore, we are to find 
ultimate truth and reality within the range of 
external nature, it must in some way be based 
on the evidence of our senses. As distinguished 
from our own consciousness we can in a measure 
regard the sense world as an independent region 
of causal sequences having a dignity and an 
ultimate truth peculiar to itself. There is an 
insistent certainty about experience which pleads 
its own cause. We must believe in it. There is, 
therefore, every reason for beginning a search 
for the reality of life and nature in nature itself. 
Such a theory of reality is in truth a realism, for 
it asserts, with no small degree of modesty, that 
reality is found crouching beneath our ordinary 
sense impressions. Reality is outside conscious- 

18 



EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 19 

ness in the world of physical objects, a world 
that is true because it is forever pressing inward 
on the mind with an insistency that involves 
belief. The stern facts of sense do not lie. Their 
truth is the truth of an everlasting reality beyond 
and above our own varying consciousness. 

Kealism as a theory of real existence is directly 
built on the assumption that sense-experiences 
lead to a true reality. We know nothing of 
material reals except as they are manifest through 
sense impressions. There is the test, there is 
the fulcrum by which alone the reason may enter 
into possession of the world of external nature. 
Experience can give us only a theory of knowl- 
edge; realism is a theory of reality. Yet the 
one is bound up in the other, — the ultimate reality 
of external nature stands or falls with our analysis 
of experience. The first step in any understand- 
ing of reality is in the direction of an under- 
standing of the character and sources of our 
knowledge. Experience must plead its own 
cause. 

Often are we told that in the given experience 
there is an immediacy and a finality beneath 
which our ordinary human consciousness cannot 
penetrate. We are told that experience is simple; 



20 LIFE AS REALITY 

it must point to something ultimate. We all 
feel an innate confidence in experience; we 
attach to its decisions a strength and a vigor 
which no other authority, whatever may be its 
character, can quite repudiate. Since the days 
of Bacon and Locke the scientific mind of all the 
world has turned to experience as the supreme 
court of appeal, for by her evidence all things 
human reach a final decision. She has no wily 
ways to lead astray men's minds. "A fact is a 
fact, an experience is an experience," — so runs 
the golden rule of the empiricist. Here truth 
begins, here it ends. 

This, in a word, is the creed of the empiricist. 
He is a self-satisfied, eminently practical individ- 
ual, always right, not by virtue of any wisdom 
of his own, but because of his unbounded con- 
fidence in his mistress. He never doubts in his 
own name, but always in the name of his oracle. 
His doubts are never true doubts, they are only 
echoes of what experience might say. His 
mental poise is never ruffled, he never feels the 
sting of uncertainty that sometimes falls to the 
lot of his less confident brethren. Every one of 
us has been an empiricist at some period of life. 
It is a larval stage through which we all pass, 



EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 21 

so simple and naively fascinating is the world 
of sense certainty. The stage, however, is not 
permanent. A child breaks open its toy in order 
to see for himself its mechanism. So it is with 
all of us; there comes a time when our simple 
confidence in the unvarying certainty of the sense 
world is no longer self-satisfying and we find 
ourselves, too, inquiring what is this experience 
to which our confidence is so firmly shackled. 

The belief in the reality of nature rests on 
sensations. The experience of the bit of paper is 
to each one of us a composite group of sensations, 
— whiteness, evenness, shape, contour, stiffness, 
pliability, toughness, etc. In all this description, 
it will be observed that we never have before us 
directly, in an immediate manner, the experience 
of this one bit of paper. The experience stands 
as a complex of sensations associated together 
because they all occur at one point in our con- 
sciousness. Even the single sensation is not 
immediately itself and nothing else. The paper 
is white, but is not whiteness associated with 
snow, clouds, cloth, mosques, and a thousand 
other objects? And in a similar way every other 
quality by which the paper is sensed as an object 
of experience belongs to many other objects 



22 LIFE AS REALITY 

quite different in character from the paper. 
The sensations, immediate though they seem, are, 
therefore, only the common elements among 
experiences. 

Qualities do not inhere within a single experi- 
ence; they are part and parcel of many. No 
sense experience can ever come to consciousness 
which is not both itself and also the common 
quality of a thousand other experiences. It is 
by means of these common qualities, whiteness, 
roundness, smoothness, and the like, that experi- 
ence becomes intelligible to our consciousness. 
These and similar qualities knit our world of 
sense impressions into a closely woven whole. 
We see nature not as a series of disconnected 
objects. We see it rather as an interrelated 
whole, with the web-lines running in all directions. 
All this is not new. It was pointed out centuries 
ago by the Platonic Socrates, and its truth is 
as certain now as then. 

The interrelatedness of all experiences through 
the common qualities of the sensations points 
to the importance of the conscious mind, where 
alone relations have their place of abode. Nor 
can this be disproved by a certain type of modern 
empiricist who claims that relations, like sense- 



EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 23 

objects, can be immediately sensed. " White- 
ness " and "complexity" cannot be directly 
experienced in the same way as "white paper" 
and "machine," for relations develop as the 
mind develops. They are genetic like conscious- 
ness. Whiteness, as a relation among objects, 
is different for you at one age from what it is at 
another, and much more are such relations as 
complexity the direct result of mental activity. 
They depend on training and insight, which are 
characters in no sense empirical, unless the 
empiricist stretches the meaning of his term out 
of all proportion to the significance in which he 
ordinarily uses it. Mechanical complexity is 
quite a different relation to the trained mechanic 
than what it is to one untrained, notwithstanding 
it may be excited by looking at the same machine. 
The relations are not static; they are constituted 
through our life's interest and the grasp of our 
mind. The sheet of paper and the mosque of 
Djedid have no connection in themselves, yet 
through the common quality of whiteness the 
mind is able to bring them into a single class. 
This association does not He in the paper nor in 
the mosque, nor does it spring full- armed from 
the forehead of a creator. It is due rather to an 



24 LIFE AS REALITY 

attitude of our will activity. The whiteness is 
not crude passiveness. Nothing in the world is 
quite that. It stands for something which re- 
sponds to my life purpose in a particular way. 
It is a bit of raw material which my will reacts 
to and translates into something intelligible. 
The understanding of experience, with the assort- 
ment and arrangement which my consciousness 
involves, is nothing but a retroactive process by 
which those values of my life which I define for 
myself from moment to moment become crystal- 
lized in an objective world. 

We hesitate to pass over this matter. The 
whole thread of materialism, pluralism and 
positivism hangs upon the predicates of experi- 
ence. Yet it seems hard to conceive how empiri- 
cism and materialism can see in experience an 
absolutely sundered and external reality if they 
are unable to account for the setting of experience 
in consciousness and life. To follow their reason- 
ing to its logical outcome leads us to a world of 
ultimate matter devoid of mind and conscious- 
ness and life. But it is a fact, unquestionable 
on account of its directness, that experiences 
are without meaning unless they bear relations 
to an experiencing mind, and this simple unassail- 



EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 25 

able fact carries us beyond the pure externality of 
experience into the very citadel of consciousness. 

The empiricist is, therefore, in a peculiarly 
disagreeable predicament. He cannot accept 
the absolute uncritical ultimateness of his experi- 
ence, because he must admit the relation of 
sensation to a sensing consciousness. If this 
simple fact is admitted he must take refuge in 
some form of critical empiricism in which experi- 
ences play hide and seek with themselves in 
their endeavor to ignore consciousness, at the 
same time that they recognize it. The empiricist 
must interpret experience for what it stands. 
The issue, therefore, narrows itself to whether 
experience stands for an external reality, of 
which we know and can know nothing, or else 
for something that is intelligible to our con- 
sciousness. What is intelligible to consciousness 
is so only because it bears a relation to it, and 
this relation transforms the something into 
values which are not merely for themselves, but 
also for consciousness. 

Experience stands for something, because it is 
experience for consciousness. This cannot be 
repeated too often, because the empiricist forgets 
its import as soon as he has heard it. Experience 



26 LIFE AS REALITY 

stands for something that is not in isolation and 
self completeness. It stands for something that 
is fully intelligible to consciousness, to life, in 
whose roots consciousness is itself grounded. 
Experience is a reflection of a life process, — the 
projection of life into a world conceived as differ- 
ent from ourselves. Thus it stands for one of 
the ways the final reality of life is objectified, 
one of the ways reality is revealed to human 
consciousness. This is the result that must 
remain for us permanent. The meaning of 
experience, the truth of experience, the reality of 
experience lies in the expression of life. This is 
empiricism in its lowest terms. 



The empiricist, with his sense certainty, is 
only on the threshold of a theory of reality. In 
the background lies realism. Empiricism is 
merely a theory of the source of our knowledge; 
realism is a theory of reality. All realists, so 
far as there is any uniformity in their teachings, 
believe in a truth independent of consciousness 
and life. They stand for the permanent reality 
of a sub-sensuous world, the pictures of which 



EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 27 

are presented to us through experience. The 
ancient strait between realism and idealism is a 
contest over the reality underlying our simple 
sense experience. The realists believe sensation 
mirrors a final reality different from conscious- 
ness; the idealist believes it is the mirroring of 
some form of consciousness itself. Both, we 
echo, must meet at the reality of life. 

Eealism is as ancient as human speculation. 
In the old days it was practically synonymous 
with materialism, but of late years it has under- 
gone many refining processes. The basis of 
modern realism is critical common sense. It 
recognizes the relativity of all sense images, but 
fails to see why this single characteristic accounts 
for the richness of our world. The whole of 
reality cannot, seemingly, be reduced to a system 
of relations, for mere relations must have some 
substantial cores upon which to adhere. Rela- 
tions involve terms related, which are decidedly 
different from the mere relations, — there can be 
no whiteness without white objects. Some- 
where in the great world of nature there must be 
primal elements of reality which are not mere 
relation. There must be the centers of reality 
which bear the relations. 



28 LIFE AS REALITY 

The realist contends, moreover, that only from 
such a world of independently real elements can 
we understand the " stubbornness," the " external- 
ness" of daily experience. Mere relation, a 
world of nothing but the gray, dull uniformity 
of relation, cannot explain the variety of our 
world, teeming with incident and purpose. The 
realist builds up reality. He starts with cer- 
tain ultimate units as its elements; they are 
to him the bricks and the mortar out of 
which the world of our own sense imagery is 
evolved. 

The realist is thus a profound believer in the 
constructive power of our minds. He hopes that 
by taking these crude elements of which we know 
next to nothing we may succeed in building a 
world of consciousness of which we know next 
to everything. But has he made reality clearer 
to us? In order for us to believe in a system of 
reals beyond consciousness he must predicate 
to this reality some determinable character by 
which we shall know something regarding it. 
To say "'tis there " is pure dogmatism no longer 
tolerated in any search for reality. 

The realist must describe his system of reals 
ere he can convince us of their reality. Many 



EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 29 

have been his attempts and as many have been 
his failures. The only character with which he 
can consistently endow his elements is the 
character of " unrelatedness." Like the isolated 
monads of an old German philosopher, conceived 
to have "no windows to look out of," these modern 
monadistic " reals " are so independent, so entirely 
free from relativity, that all relationship has 
vanished. Each is supreme and unqualified 
within a narrow sphere of its own. Yet the 
realist would build our world out of just such 
elements. He would ordain a kind of universal 
reality to spring from these isolated "reals" 
and breathe into the system he has thus created 
a life and a vigor and a relativity which is entirely 
foreign to its nature. Such a course is conceiv- 
able, it is at least within the limits of possibility, 
but is it an adequate theory of our real world? 
Does it fit the very facts that the realist is working 
so valiantly to understand and to explain? If 
our world is full of relations and nothing is 
known to us except in terms of these relations, 
does it seem plausible that the ultimate units 
of such a universe are totally without rela- 
tions? Still if the realist admits a degree of 
relativity among the "reals" he has forsaken 



30 LIFE AS REALITY 

his original position and called a truce with 
the idealists. 

Kealism claims to have reached the elements 
of experience. It believes that beneath every 
sense impression there is a something which cannot 
be resolved further. Yet this something in 
order to enter into the building of our world 
must be like the world. It must have relations. 
No relative ultimate, no matter how precisely or 
how carefully denned, but what must have 
relations to other hypothetical units similar to 
itself. However valiantly the realist may strive 
to define his "real" without involving relations, 
still that real must be a part, a significant part, 
of his own life. Here he is silent. The promised 
land of the realist, flowing with milk and honey, 
dwindles down into a collection of elements most 
like mere points in their supreme individuality 
and least like our world of concrete sensations, 
thoughts and feelings. The universe that the 
realist would build out of his irreducible units is 
not our world of sense experience, nor does it 
breathe the free air of our world of thought and 
action. It is not living. 

Finally after resorting to every artifice of 
description, every subterfuge of dialectic, the 



EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 31 

modern realist takes refuge in the sophistry of 
the mathematical limit. He is willing to admit 
with us that the single experience is known to 
human consciousness as a cluster of relations, 
but he insists likewise that the true reality, the 
real, may be conceived through a process of 
abstraction. This stand of the modern realist 
may be illustrated by the old example of the 
sheet of white paper. Among its many qualities 
that of its whiteness is conspicuous. If we 
imagine this quality of whiteness removed all the 
rest of the qualities of the paper remain, — the 
smoothness, the fibrous texture, the form and 
all else that makes the experience of the paper 
just what it is. Then again we may believe, 
perhaps, that the quality of smoothness is taken 
away. This leaves the paper with all its qualities 
except those of whiteness and smoothness. By 
some such process of abstraction the modern 
realist of this particular type conceives one 
quality of an experience after another removed 
until nothing remains but the mere limit, the 
mere "end quality ' ' which is gradually approached 
in our conception as quality after quality of the 
sense experience is abstracted away. The real is 
that "substratum of permanence" which is 



32 LIFE AS REALITY 

approached but never reached. The real is the 
hmit, — that and nothing more. 1 

Assuming this position, the realist claims to 
have inherited the mantle of Kant and Herbart. 
He would infuse into the " thing-in-itself " a kind 
of artificial life drawn largely from the analogy 
between the sense process of experience and the 
form of a mathematical series. As a limit the 
realist believes that his real is beyond the scope of 
perception, yet real in the truest, deepest sense. 
All this may be true, but it is above all else vague 
and artificial. In the extreme position into which 
the realist has been driven reality is made differ- 
ent from anything known to consciousness. 
Yet this strange, unnatural kind of reality is 
connected with actual experience by the relation of 
the terms of a series and their limit. But this 

1 In a previous publication this theory was advocated, — 
that reality of an objective kind could be reached by a 
process of abstracting qualities from sense experiences. 
This theory of the realist seems to me no longer tenable, 
because (a) Reality would be individual and hence have no 
relation to the qualities; (b) Knowledge of the terms of a 
mathematical series does not justify a knowledge of the 
limit; (c) What reality shall be ascribed to the qualities 
themselves if the reals are the limits left over after the 
qualities are removed? (d) What relation do the reals bear 
to one another if they are mere limits? 



EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 33 

makes the kind of sense-reality which we meet 
with through experience absolutely unreal, since 
reality is that which by definition is unattainable 
through the senses. We have the world of reality 
reduced to an unrelated mass of psycho-mathe- 
matical limits, conceivable only through the 
artificial staging which this particular type 
of realist has erected about our simple ordinary 
experience. But again we ask of the realist, as 
we asked of his brother of less mathematical 
pretensions, — What kind of a world have you 
built out of these figments of your mind? It is 
certainly not the world of our actual experience, 
since the world of our daily knowledge is full 
of those sense qualities which are arbitrarily 
denied to the reals. Mathematics is at best an 
abstraction from experience. Its conceptions are 
derived at the last analysis from experience, and 
like all other theoretical constructions have their 
validity and their value tested at the court of 
experience. 

At this point the modern realist of contemporary 
philosophical journals makes answer. He would 
drive realism to the opposite extreme. The real 
is not a limit produced by abstraction, it is, on 
the contrary, a limit of fullness. All our descrip- 



34 LIFE AS REALITY 

tions of an experience are inadequate to the 
"real reality" of what is somehow involved in 
the experience. Therefore, let us call the " real " 
the limit which all our descriptions of an experi- 
ence approach as we add to it quality after 
quality, truth after truth. The real is therefore 
the complete saturation of reality, the limit 
approached by our finite and meager descriptions 
as we approach nearer and nearer its full and 
ultimate description. 

This young realist is, unfortunately, in no 
better position than his elder brother. He is 
still wallowing in the theory of Hmits and its vague 
subtleties. For if the "real" is no more than 
the " limit of descriptions " it can hardly be more 
than the goal in consciousness for our ordinary 
descriptive powers. Under this spell the real 
becomes in the truest sense unreal. It is non- 
existent. It is what the world might be were 
consciousness and our finite powers of description 
capable of doing what they cannot do, namely, 
of reaching some ultimate limit. 

The modern realist, with all his constructive 
devices, has therefore made no progress toward 
the actual solution of the problem of reality. He 
has been driven through long years of controversy, 



EXPERIENCE AND THE REALIST 35 

like a retreating army from ditch to ditch, until 
finally in the last trench he has fortified his 
position by an appeal to the analogy between 
experience and the theory of hmits. He has 
sought to explain the comparatively lucid world 
of actual life by artificial constructions which 
remove reality forever from all that we can know 
in our simple daily experience. In his efforts 
to clarify and make real the core of reality which 
we all believe to exist somewhere in experience 
he has had recourse to an artificial staging which 
carries reality forever beyond the fight of sense 
and consciousness. There, in his last trench, we 
leave the realist. 



The failure of the empiricist and the realist 
to reach an ultimate theory of reality proves not 
the least that experience in itself is unreal. It 
proves only that the reality of experience is not 
borrowed from some vague external world intel- 
ligible only in being unintelligible. It shows 
conclusively that simple experiences derive their 
import from those very life processes which we 
employ in interpreting their meaning. Experi- 
ence stands for intelligibihty, for consciousness, 



36 LIFE AS REALITY 

for life. We understand experience, not because 
it points to an external, unknowable world, 
foreign to our own life, but because it is the pro- 
jection of that life. It is in the truest and deepest 
sense a revelation of our own life activity. 

This is the final meaning of experience, but 
there is another phase of its value which con- 
tinually demands attention. It is the place of 
experience in science. The order and the system 
of our world of sense perception is not without 
its bearing on the problem of reality. One fact 
of experience does not give us all of the life that 
is revealed through the senses. It occupies 
merely a niche in an ideal whole. This whole is 
science. 



Ill 

SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 

Watch narrowly 
The demonstration of a truth, its birth, 
And you trace back the effluence to its spring 
And source within us. 

—Browning. 

It is the frequent boast of the practical scientist 
that progress in our understanding of nature has 
run parallel with the forward movement of 
civilization. The human race has accumulated 
from age to age a fund of experiences which it 
has woven into a compact whole. This accumu- 
lated fund of knowledge from experience has met 
every new demand thrust upon it and has, 
therefore, incited a confidence in the natural 
sciences. Ever since the old days of the English 
empiricist science has brought to bear these 
conspicuous practical achievements as evidence 
of its grasp on the true reality. It has asserted 
with pride that any branch of human knowledge 
so eminently successful along its own lines must 

37 



38 LIFE AS REALITY 

be built on some permanent foundation. It has 
furthermore asserted that this permanent founda- 
tion must be akin to the true reality. 

The practical success of science has tended to 
hinder the proper estimate of its ability to see the 
underlying problems with which it is grappling. 
The purely practical results of any inquiry are 
quite different in character from the presupposi- 
tions upon which the inquiry rests. The practical 
bearing of sanitation on sociological questions is 
quite different from an examination into the 
pathology of the pneumococcus. Navigation is 
different from astrophysics, engineering from 
pure mathematics, and even pure mathematics is 
quite different from the investigations into the 
nature of space and time manifolds. So in all 
sciences the practical undertakings present a type 
of problem in no wise identical with that dealing 
with the kind of reality underlying scientific 
labors. Science is successful in its elaboration of 
nature, — so much is vouchsafed on every hand, 
— yet we demand to know the kind of reality upon 
which scientific truth is built. 

Science is conspicuously obj ective. Its material 
must be thrown on a screen. There must be some 
device for making a fact an object for examination, 



SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 39 

else it has no place in science. Even in psychology 
and sociology where the facts arise through human 
consciousness these facts must be capable of 
empirical description and measurement ere they 
can be stamped with the hall mark of the scien- 
tific fact. In a word, science deals throughout 
all its branches with objects. The reality with 
which it is concerned is the reality of objects. 
In reaching this kind of reality science has the 
same instrument as philosophical realism, — 
namely, experience. 

The estimations of the values of experience 
have brought to light, in the preceding chapter, 
nothing ultimate except the life values into which 
they lead. These life values are no more akin 
to the type of reality for which scientific realism 
is seeking than they are like the type of reality 
for which philosophical realism stood. Behind 
the experience lies the perception of sense quali- 
ties and behind this the life values which give 
experience its content. Through the relativity 
of all sensation-qualities we make experience 
what it is by reference to the activity of our own 
life process. AH that we know through the 
senses is nothing except as it is made vital through 
the inner process of living. So much for the 



40 LIFE AS REALITY 

content of experience, which, under the scrutiny 
of analysis, turns out to be a content of life. 

But science is not merely experience. It is 
something more. It is constructive, and that 
vast structural fabric which it weaves out of the 
separate elements of experience has a breadth 
and a comprehension that places it on another 
plane. Science necessarily deals with sense im- 
pressions and for this reason the form of its 
knowledge must bear the characteristics of its 
origin. Yet notwithstanding this, one is led to 
recognize a marked difference between the truth 
of science as it is reached from an elaborate 
process of observation, experiment and induction, 
and the crude experiences which jostle against 
one another in the normal human consciousness. 
In themselves all these simple elementary sense 
impressions are identical in value. But out of 
this plebeian mass a certain chosen few rise con- 
spicuously into the foreground. All smooth- 
coated peas are to all intents and purposes alike, 
but in the course of certain experiments on 
inheritance it is quite possible that the experience 
of a single pea might make or mar some broad 
phylogenetic theory. The astronomer often has 
groups of experiences which are essentially alike 



SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 41 

in character, but on account of some depth of 
meaning which he himself alone observes, one 
member of this group stands out clearly from the 
rest, — as, for example, when Young observed 
the reversal layer in the sun's spectrum during 
the total eclipse of 1870. The germinal cells 
of a certain insect contain normally twenty-seven 
little bodies, but some of these cells contain a 
twenty-eighth, and upon this seemingly insig- 
nificant difference hangs a wonderfully ingenious 
theory of sex determination. So it is throughout 
all ranges of science, — it is not so much the 
experience itself that counts as it is the signifi- 
cance of that experience in the intellectual back- 
ground of the investigator. 

Science is constructive. But the elements of 
her pattern are not experiences themselves in 
their rude simplicity, but rather the meanings 
for which these simple sense impressions stand. 
The pattern bears very little resemblance to the 
single threads. A multitude of animals is a very 
different matter from the meanings attached to 
them in systematic zoology. Fossil and living 
armadillos stand for nothing unless their meanings 
can be compared. But when these meanings are 
compared it is possible to build from them vast 



42 LIFE AS REALITY 

generalizations like that of evolution. Science 
may be said, therefore, to build her structures 
out of the mind- values of experiences and not 
out of the raw sense impressions. She represents 
the organization of the meanings of experience, 
and one must observe that the meanings are 
themselves not empirical but teleological. They 
arise as one human effort through the medium of 
which men may express themselves. They find 
a place in science because in them men may find 
a field for their own life interests, the self- 
expressions of fife as it is revealed to them. 

Again we repeat, science is constructive. The 
sense impressions which furnish the raw material 
for all scientific inductions lack the objective 
permanence and stability which scientific truth 
demands. Sensations when reduced to their 
lowest terms are mental images. While, perhaps, 
we can breathe into them an objective back- 
ground by referring them back in every case to 
their external objective source, still they are 
transient and variable. They are vitiated by 
the relativity of all mental facts, whereas science 
demands an invariant basis upon which to erect 
the permanence of its constructions. On account 
of this instability of our ordinary sense world 



SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 43 

science must reconstruct its experiences in such 
a manner that they assume some character of 
permanence. They must become universal. It 
will not do for a star to appear bright at one 
instant, dull at another, red to one observer, 
yellow to another, unless these differences can 
be easily attributed to atmospheric or other causes. 
A chemical reaction must be the same if observed 
under the same conditions no matter by whom 
or at what place or time. Moreover, personal 
standards will not answer. In recent cata- 
logues of the stars a certain sixth-magnitude 
star is taken as the basis for all photometric 
measurements and the brightness of all stars 
is determined by reference to this standard. In 
this sense, therefore, the standard becomes the 
test for the experience. 

The very nature of experience demands clear 
standards of permanence. In its real nature all 
experience arises through the actual living of 
life. It is active in the truest sense and not the 
passive imagery of a world of reals beyond life. 
Yet it is only a passive world of permanence, 
which does not change with the observer or with 
time, that can serve as the invariant referendum 
for scientific truth. The first task for science. 



44 LIFE AS REALITY 

therefore, is to discover a system of checks for 
transferring the ordinary life values of our every- 
day experience into the constants of universal ex- 
perience. In this problem of giving a permanent 
basis to the values of experience science presents 
her own solution to the problem of reality. It 
is not the solution of the empiricist, because 
science knows that experience is fragmentary 
and the reality she seeks is the universalism of 
nature; it is not the solution of the realist, because 
science stealthily avoids metaphysics, and at 
those junctures when she approaches its subtle- 
ties nearest she shrinks from the pluralism of 
realism. No. Science has her own belief regard- 
ing the nature of the universe, her own conception 
of the place of experience in reality. 



The type of reality to which science cleaves 
is of a constructive character. Starting with the 
given sense image, with all its fringe of sub- 
jective meaning, the scientist may either reason 
backward to certain elementary constants, the 
structural elements of his subject, or else he may 
reason forward to certain generalizations repre- 



SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 45 

senting the theoretical superstructure of his 
subject. In one case he pursues a deductive 
method, using experience as the general type and 
discovering within it certain invariant elements, 
like atoms or species. In the other case he follows 
an inductive method, using experience as the 
concrete illustration of some universal law, — 
the falling apple and the rotation of the moon 
illustrating gravity. In the first instance experi- 
ence is the premise from which it is possible to 
deduce concrete expectations, — just as the char- 
acteristics of the unit species, Alca impennis, are 
determined from the one or two known specimens 
of the great auk. In the second instance experi- 
ence supplies the specific facts from which it is 
possible to construct broad generalizations, as, 
for example, the dissociation hypothesis from 
certain anomalies in the behavior of acids and 
salts. In any case, however, experience with 
its setting in the living consciousness of the 
scientist is the starting point. The reality 
sought for by science, in its invariant elements 
and its universal laws, is a reality firmly anchored 
to the sense experience of conscious living be- 
ings. To understand the characteristics of these 
types of reality, the >. elements and the laws, 



46 LIFE AS REALITY 

they must be traced back to their own native 
wilds. 



Instances of elementary realities in the sciences 
are of frequent occurrence. There is no science 
quite devoid of them, although they take different 
forms in accordance with the particular demands 
of each special province of inquiry. In physics 
the atom and the molecule have long occupied 
fundamental positions, but at the present time 
other elementary constants such as the corpus- 
cle, — or unit of negative electricity, — with the 
corresponding unit of positive electricity, seem to 
have assumed more significant positions. The 
atom still remains, however, of the deepest 
importance to chemistry, notwithstanding the 
efforts of the physical chemists to substitute 
a more variable unit. The other sciences have 
elementary constants as well as physics and 
chemistry. Among modern works on inheritance, 
especially after Mendel's law had been studied, 
it was found necessary to presuppose certain 
inheritable unit characters, like blackness of 
pigment or length of hair; it seemed necessary 
to assume that these could be inherited from 



SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 47 

generation to generation. They are, therefore, 
of the nature of hereditary constants. Another 
very useful constant in biology is the species. 
The psychologist, on account of the profound 
complexity of mental life, has always assumed 
that there must be certain elementary con- 
stituents of which all the higher states of con- 
sciousness are composed. He has called these 
units sensations. Such are types of elementary 
constants, — the corpuscle, the atom, the unit 
inheritable character, the sensation. Each, it 
will be observed, is the result of an elaborate 
process of deduction from experience, brought 
about by the demand for estabhshing certain 
permanent grounds which may be conceived as 
underlying the variability of our ordinary sense 
impressions. The reality which we ascribe to 
these scientific abstractions can be better under- 
stood from an examination into two typical 
instances, as, for example, the chemical atom 
and the biological unit of heredity. 

The conception of the atom has become 
fairly clear in recent years because of certain 
wonderful discoveries in physics. As originally 
denned by the English chemist, Dalton, the atom 
was simply the smallest bit of matter that could 



48 LIFE AS REALITY 

enter into a chemical union. Dalton did not 
assert that the atom was the smallest possible 
particle of matter. This was an interpretation 
which arose later, based simply on the dogmatic 
assumption that the smallest chemical unit must 
be the smallest physical unit. The recent dis- 
coveries in connection with the Eontgen ray 
and the radio-active elements have entirely 
upset this assumption and shown that there 
exist physical units, the corpuscles, almost incom- 
parably smaller than the mass of a hydrogen 
atom, — ' ' the volume of a corpuscle bears to that 
of the atom about the same relation as a speck 
of dust to the volume of a room" (Thompson). 
But yet in spite of the discovery of what we might 
call the dust of atoms the old conception of the 
atom remains essentially the same. 

These new experiments, instead of destroying 
our belief in atoms as the units of matter, have 
tended in remarkable and unforeseen ways to bear 
additional evidence to their support. In a 
marvelous manner the electrically charged atoms 
of helium (a gas occurring sparingly in the 
atmosphere) have been actually counted. These 
charged atoms are given off from radium in a 
continual stream. Crookes found that every 



SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 49 

time such a charged atom of helium struck a 
peculiarly prepared screen a visible flash was 
produced. Modifying the screen and using a 
microscope he was able to actually count the 
number of flashes per second. 1 Later Dewar 
computed the volume of helium that was given 
off from radium in a second from the amount 
given off in a longer time. Combining these 
two results the number of atoms in a cubic centi- 
meter of helium turns out to be 25,600,000,000,- 
000,000,000. This example will perhaps suffice 
to show that atoms can be no longer regarded 
as figments of the scientist's imagination. They 
have been numbered by several independent 
methods, they have been weighed and the laws 
of their structure studied, — and all this with an 
abundance of experimental background. 

The unit characters of inheritance have not as 
yet received the abundant empirical justification 
that is associated with the physical atom. It 
is an old observation that certain characteristics 
persist unaltered through many generations, 



*The emanations were also counted by Rutherford, 
using an electrical device. This independent method gave 
results agreeing essentially with the optical method of 
Crookes. 



50 LIFE AS REALITY 

notwithstanding the introduction of opposite 
tendencies. We often notice how a certain 
color of eye or form of feature is handed down 
from parent to child. Breeders of animals have 
long recognized the relative permanence of many 
desirable or undesirable features and they have 
striven to regulate their practical experiments 
with this in mind. In the early sixties a brilliant 
Austrian priest cultivated certain varieties of the 
ordinary pea and kept a careful record of the re- 
sults. He found that if smooth-coated peas were 
bred to a wrinkled- coated variety the resulting 
hybrids would all be smooth-coated. But if some 
of these hybrids were then bred among themselves 
a fourth of this second generation of hybrids 
would be wrinkled like one of the grandparents. 
Obviously the wrinkledness lay dormant in the 
middle generation, ready to show itself again. 
Obviously hidden away in the germ cells of this 
middle generation lay both smoothness and 
wrinkledness, the one smothering the other to 
our eyes but incapable of killing it. Each of 
these characters could be regarded as a unit 
character capable of passing from generation to 
generation essentially unaltered and unalterable. 
Our microscopic technique is at present too crude 



SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 51 

to detect the presence of such unit characters in 
the germinal cells but their presence is a necessary 
assumption, 1 for by no other means, the biologist 
contends, can he explain the facts of inheritance 
in many plants and animals. 

These two instances, the atom and the unit 
inheritable character, indicate the kind of reality 
that we must ascribe to the elementary con- 
stants of science. It will be observed that no 
one ever actually saw an atom, although modern 
ingenuity has opened up many avenues of intricate 
observation by which these inconceivably minute 
bits can be actually measured and weighed. We 
believe also that the germ plasm has associated 
with it many inheritable characters, attested to 
by several lines of experiment and observation, 
but yet the microscopist has never seen any 
of these characters. Evidently the indirect 
methods of approach, available in each case, 
are at best methods of interpretation. This 
interpretation is a process of evaluating according 
to definite mentally conceived standards. 

1 The work of McClung, Wilson and others on the chromo- 
some structure of the male gametes seems to indicate that 
the cytological basis of sex determination is almost within 
the grasp of science. 



52 * LIFE AS REALITY 

We are compelled to recognize, whatever our 
form of description, that the reality of the atom 
and the inheritable unit arises through a process 
of transferring certain objective facts into some- 
thing intelligible to our own consciousness. It 
is because the atom moves, has comparable size, 
can give off energy units, in short because it 
"does something" in the broadest acceptation 
of the phrase that we believe in its existence. 
The capacity to do something, this standing for 
a predictable set of activities, is simply the 
translation of our own life activity into terms of 
objective experience. Our own life world is a 
world of movement; it is what it expresses. 
We are what we do, — we stand for what we 
have the capacity of doing. And when the vast 
variety of experiences crowd in upon our con- 
sciousness and demand some kind of organization 
our first effort is to infuse order into this mass 
by reducing the whole to elementary units and 
then to picture these units in terms of our own 
life activity. Hence the structural constants 
of science are real because they bear the impress 
of our own will impulse. 

The atom is real, it is no vague image of 
scientific delirium. It existed in essentially the 



SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 53 

same form centuries before electricity and radium 
were thought of, when the old Greeks, Democritus 
and Leucippus, taught that matter was composed 
of particles eternally moving. The atoms do 
something, they stand for something in a system 
of real activities, and that made them real for 
the Greek as it does for us. The unit character 
of inheritance means a reality to us because we 
see in it that something which underlies trans- 
formations from generation to generation, a 
kind of living force behind organic evolution. 
We cannot conceive of a purely passive, inactive, 
"do nothing" unit, for this means nothing to 
our intelligence. Some chemists have wished 
to do away with the atomic theory, preferring 
to explain chemical reactions in more abstract 
terms, but without avail. The human mind 
demands a concrete, and at the same time 
dynamic basis for its thoughts. Beneath all our 
science and our experience there is the innate 
belief that nature can be understood only on 
general dynamical principles, a belief which finds 
its source in the struggle of life to express itself. 
In a sense the elementary constants of science 
are more real than the shifting scenes of our 
sense world. Yet this is a reality which is 



54 LIFE AS REALITY 

knowable only through the projection of our 
own life, teeming with will activity, into that very 
world of experiences we seek to interpret and 
make permanent. Here is the reality of the 
corpuscles, the "eanalstrahlen," the atoms, the 
molecules, the species and all the other constants 
of our empirical world. They are real because 
they reflect human life activity. They are real 
to life, as a living reality, because they stand for 
a particular transformation of a life meaning. 
In this they do their work and fulfill their purposes. 



The elementary constants of the types just 
considered represent the permanent individuals 
of science according to which sense impressions 
are standardized. The universals in science are 
its laws. They group together larger ranges 
of experience in accordance with some simple 
but usually abstract characteristic. The so- 
called law of gravity expresses the attractive 
character of all objects. Falling bodies on this 
planet as well as the changes in position of the 
components of double stars exhibit concrete 
instances of the law. It is thus a shorthand 



SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 55 

formula of what might be expected from experi- 
ence under certain conditions. 

The principle of recapitulation in embryology 
affords a fair illustration of the scientific law. It 
has not the mathematical rigidity of a physical 
law, but yet the experiences upon which it 
depends are sufficiently distinct to afford well- 
defined tests. The early embryologists observed 
that many embryos developed according to a 
succession of stages that duplicated forms lower 
down in the animal series. The sheep embryo, 
for example, is first a single one-celled body, 
corresponding to the primitive protozoa. Later 
on it assumes a form analogous to the group to 
which the jellyfish belongs. Still later it is 
worm-like, with its various rudimentary organs 
in analogous positions. Again it has the gills 
of the fish, although these soon disappear as the 
sheep approaches the form of all mammalian 
embryos. This law, moreover, vague as it may 
seem, has been made the ground of predictions 
concerning unknown experiences. Indeed, so 
well defined is it in the minds of some embry- 
ologists that they have been able to trace the 
whole evolutionary development of a group of 
animals by a careful study of their embryos. 



56 LIFE AS REALITY 

Later these suppositions have been verified by 
the rinding of the earlier forms among the fossils 
of old rocks. A certain Eussian zoologist used 
this law of recapitulation as the basis for his 
study of the development of a low vertebrate, 
hoping by its use to add evidence to the Dar- 
winian hypothesis by detecting stepping stones 
in the chasm between the lower and the higher 
animals. In its general expression the law 
indicates, therefore, a group character persisting 
throughout a certain well- defined range of experi- 
ence. It is a shorthand expression for the common 
feature or features of an extended class of 
experiences. This is the kernel of law. 

From this single instance it is obvious that 
the test of a law is found in its agreement with 
experience. The greater the range of experience 
the greater the confidence we have in the law. 
The present hypothesis of electrolytic dissocia- 
tion, upon which so much of modern chemistry 
depends, is supported by many independent 
lines of evidence, any one of which would destroy 
the theory if distinctly different x from what it 

1 At the present time the dissociation hypothesis is being 
assailed because of the anomalous behavior of strong elec- 
trolytes in solutions of medium concentration. Yet as a 



SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 57 

is. Many years ago the astronomer Bode observed 
that the distances of the planets from the snn 
could be expressed by a simple arithmetical 
progression. This was believed by practically 
all astronomers until an exception was found 
in the case of the planet Neptune. The new 
fact was regarded as the all-important value 
and "Bode's Law" was thrown aside like an 
outworn shell. For the time being the law 
served its purpose as a convenient index of 
known facts, but it was dethroned in a moment 
when a new experience was found to be at variance 
with it. 

The reality to be ascribed to the scientific law 
is somewhat different from that of the elementary 
constants. Science has evolved its elements in 
order to obtain permanence in experience; it has 
evolved its laws in order to make universal this 
permanence. But this universalism of a law 
is itself not capable of experience; it is in all 
cases extracted out of experience by a process 
of interpretation. A law has no locus, no place of 
abode, except in the intellectual imagination of 

scientific theory it has met the test of " agreement with fact " 
so well that most chemists demand a wider range of de- 
structive evidence before they consent to discard it. 



58 LIFE AS REALITY 

man. The scientist sees in experience a kind of 
life process and universalizes this into a law. 
He is successful because the kind of reality with 
which he is dealing is familiar to him as the 
reflection of his own life interest. The reality 
of the law becomes for him one phase of his own 
self-expression. It is a reality because it expresses 
activities in nature — a formula in consciousness 
for how nature duplicates life. 

We all look upon scientific law with a reverential 
respect because it presumes for itself a generality 
which carries us quite beyond the finite scope of 
our own meager sense-impressions. Yet it is 
our own mind that formulates these very laws 
for which it has such respect. And they must 
be verified ever and anon by those very sense- 
impressions which we so disdainfully call meager 
and finite. To simple experience scientific law 
is alike relative and subservient. There is 
nothing derogatory to science in this. It simply 
shows how futile are all attempts of the scientist 
to construct for himself a realm of truth which 
shall be more absolute than the world of his own 
life. He may seem to do this in the order and 
system into which he weaves experience. But 
the order and the system of science come from 



SCIENCE AND HER LAWS 59 

the projection of his own life-expression into 
the world he calls alien to his own consciousness. 
Thus much is the reality of science life. 
Whether we consider its elements or its laws we 
are driven back to the human interpretations 
of experience, at most the projections of life 
activities. We pattern our world after ourselves, 
not in consciousness, but in action. Our life is 
a continuous effort, it is action, and the reality of 
nature we reflect is dynamic. This is the truth 
of science, but it is a truth that arises through 
life. 



IV 



THE LAW OF LIFE 

Two things fill my soul with ever new and increasing 
wonder and respect, the oftener and the more attentively 
I reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the 
moral law within me. — Kant. 

Empiricism and science are concerned with 
values outside of our human consciousness. 
The empiricist, the realist and the scientist 
would all describe reality in terms of some external 
foundation, and make the values of human life 
dependent on this outer reality. They fail in 
this undertaking, not because sense experience 
is without significance or importance in the sum 
total of the world, but because the relativity of 
our world of sense impressions indicates merely 
a relative, never a final reality. Experience is 
not unreal, it simply can't be explained in the 
manner the scientist would have us believe. A 
philosophy of reality, at all thorough or self- 
satisfying, cannot stop with the unfinished 

60 



THE LAW OF LIFE 61 

philosophy of the external world. Above the 
values of experience, loom up those of life, — 
feeling, activity, morality, social welfare and 
religious faith. We turn from the external 
forms of the material world to the life-values 
revealed in human action, because we believe 
them more vital and significant to our everyday 
consciousness. First, however, we are led to 
inquire whether or not there is a formal law of 
life. 

It is human activity, ceaselessly throbbing 
and pulsating, that shapes the material world after 
its own forms. Experience is not passive and 
formless; it is rather vibrating with the reality 
which we ourselves give to it. Even Aristotle, 
the greatest of the philosophers of the material 
world, vouchsafed this much to his master Plato, 
— mere matter can never be known in its material 
purity, what we know through experience is 
always matter endowed with a rationality like 
our own. The world of consciousness, of pur- 
poses, above all else of activity and moral effort, 
this is the world that gives its values to experi- 
ence. But it is a world of order after its own 
kind. Therefore we seek its law, its expression 
of objective reality. 



62 LIFE AS REALITY 

Men must act, — life is above all else dynamic. 
To be conscious is to be conscious of impulse and 
exertion, to be self-conscious is to be conscious 
of the feeling of action. This feeling cannot be 
separated from life. Mysticism, which tries to 
give moral dignity to a mere existence of pure 
passiveness, has failed as a philosophy. It has 
failed as a religion. The Christian mystics of 
the late middle ages were out of sympathy with 
our European civilization. They did not under- 
stand that religion to have meaning to us must 
have its truth reflected in action. We crave no 
absorption into the Being of God for we cannot 
comprehend what reality means apart from 
striving and effort. Remove from life the belief 
in action and nothing remains but the outer 
wrappings. Make the ideal and the purpose of 
life the suppression of effort, of impulse to do 
in its broadest sense, then the whole import of 
life disappears. The Nirvana of the Orient is 
little else than a word concept to our consciousness, 
because any form of existence without some 
relation to action and individuality is incon- 
ceivable. Even Schopenhauer fails to mould 
Buddhism into forms acceptable to our western 
thought. He gives us an Absolute in which all 



THE LAW OF LIFE 63 

differentiation and strife are suppressed. He 
paints our conscious, human life in the somber 
colors of pessimism simply because life and 
consciousness involve action and effort. But 
Schopenhauer, subtle as he was in the analysis 
of experience, failed to perceive that his Oriental 
ideal of peace and quietness was merely the 
emotional reaction of his own volcanic tempera- 
ment. His peace was not the peace of life, for 
it had no relation to life. 

It is impossible to describe life without action. 
It is, however, necessary for us to understand 
something of what action means. We cannot 
lay aside the problems involved in our life of 
activity as the chemist might his test-tubes and 
his beakers. Our struggles, with their hopes and 
ambitions, have a practical vividness that carries 
with them our immediate attention. A jurist is 
often confronted with the difficult problem of 
deciding between two equally conclusive lines of 
evidence. He cannot postpone judgment as a 
scientist might. He must act, and great con- 
sequences may arise from his decision. In this 
sense we are all in his position. We must all 
act even though we may not understand fully 
the true import of our effort. This brings us 



64 LIFE AS REALITY 

face to face with the principles underlying the 
motives of our actions. The science of conduct 
is the science of life. It involves more than the 
distinctions of right and wrong, for in the end 
right and wrong, good and bad, are relative 
terms, valueless unless justified by some ultimate 
standard. Determine first this standard and all 
human actions and purposes can be understood 
without difficulty; but if life is without organiza- 
tion and purpose, then the simplest act lacks 
meaning and the drama of life becomes the 
tragedy of fatalism or the purposeless play of 
chance. 

It is a part of our nature to believe in life and 
seek for its purpose. It is impossible to live 
without the quest. The simplest thought or 
act transcends itself; it means more, it is more, 
than appears on its face. The moment we try 
to ask of it what this more is, then we are driven 
backward, step by step, to the final issues of life. 
Broad moral questions and the conflict of duties 
often hang on simple everyday acts. We would 
avoid all the perplexities of the deeper problems 
of speculation, but we find ourselves there almost 
from the outset. We would confine ourselves to 
the concrete, practical everyday facts of life, 



THE LAW OF LIFE 65 

we would avoid assiduously all the bypaths of 
metaphysics which have perplexed our impractical 
brothers, but we find ourselves thrown into these 
mazes by the very practical concerns to which 
we would anchor our trust. Our every thought 
and act leads into the august realm of law and 
order, leads us to inquire what is the ultimate 
significance of the whole, what is the final law of 
this life of ours to which all other concerns are 
relative. 



Ever since the days of the ancients we have 
been concerned with the principles underlying 
our actions. We have found the subject highly 
interesting, even fascinating, for it is at once 
the easiest and most difficult field of human 
inquiry. It is the easiest because its material 
lies close at hand since the problems of conduct 
have an intimacy and vividness which the 
problems of no other subject possess. Yet they 
are the most difficult because in the end human 
conduct is as multifarious as the infinite variety 
of human nature and as complex as the subtle 
springs of human action. The moralist tries to 
delve into the innermost nature of life and 



66 LIFE AS REALITY 

unmask its secret. He would crystallize the 
living germ of reality. 

Since men have begun to discuss the principles 
of their conduct there have existed side by side 
two distinguishable currents of thought. Each 
represents a different answer to the problem of 
conduct. Each finds the solution of the problem 
in some external basis of authority but differs 
in regard to the nature of this authority. On 
the one side stands the empirical school, fostered 
largely by the Ango- Saxon confidence in the 
world of experience; on the other side stand 
those who find the basis of human action in some 
source deeply spiritual in its nature and perhaps 
almost religious. Sometimes this spiritual source, 
external to our consciousness, may take the form 
of a belief in the ultimate goodness of God, 
sometimes it may find its authority in the con- 
science or duty. The point of importance is 
the objective character of each of these standards. 

The Anglo-Saxon thinkers have stood out 
boldly for the empirical view of fife. They have 
carried their deductions into the field of ethics 
and have seen in the experience of the individual 
and of the race the ultimate basis of human action. 
The empirical theory of ethical values points 



THE LAW OP LIFE 67 

out that it is experience that teaches the differ- 
ence between black and white. From this simple 
observation it reasons that all judgments, colored 
by right and wrong, good or evil, are distinctions 
which may be traced finally to the broad field 
of sense impressions. Moral principles are merely 
the successful modes of conduct. From many 
experiences the race has discovered that " honesty 
is the best policy," and hence crystallizes the 
results of its experience in the moral precept, — 
"thou shalt be honest." The validity of this 
principle derives its strength from the width of 
experience upon which it is based. Were social 
relations to become very different from what 
they are now, it is conceivable that this moral 
principle might no longer hold true. Experience 
is general expediency. Here is the ultimate 
criterion of conduct. Here whatever there is 
of a moral law reaches its justification. 

Our practical mind is impressed with the vigor 
and simplicity of the empirical theory. We have 
learned in the course of years to rely upon our 
experience. We have learned to trust implicitly 
to sense perceptions and all that joins us most 
closely to the external world of fact certainty. 
But this very certainty and scope is the greatest 



68 LIFE AS REALITY 

defect of the empirical ethics. Our ideas of 
black and white, of large and small, may arise 
from experience, but that is far from proving 
that the ideas of right and wrong, good and evil, 
and our delicate appreciation of social advance- 
ment and retrogression, have a similar origin. 
Experience is at best a generalized form of sense 
impressions. Its facts obtain whatever cer- 
tainty they possess from the shifting sense 
images of a world arbitrarily described as beyond 
consciousness, — a world which is admittedly non- 
ethical in temper and value. To declare that 
human activity, throbbing and filling our whole 
being with its deep reality, finds its origin here is 
to declare that a world which is by nature passive 
and determined, which is neither moral nor 
immoral, nor has any semblance of vitality, can 
yet impose a universal law on our human life. 

Expediency, upon which experience would base 
the law of action, is purely relative. It is, more- 
over, narrow and uncertain. It may seem 
expedient to murder at one time, to be kind at 
another, but the final basis of this expediency 
is never more than a momentary emotion, based 
at best on a narrow induction from limited 
experience. Experience is different for different 



THE LAW OF LIFE 69 

persons, and a moral law derived from general 
convenience or suitableness would be as various 
and uncertain as the fruits of human experience 
are various and uncertain. Experience offers 
nothing final and ultimate of its own; we can 
hardly believe, therefore, that it can serve as the 
ultimate court of appeal for a law of life. 

One of the most graphic answers to the problem 
of " What is expedient?" is found in the utilitarian 
commandment, — act so to achieve the greatest 
happiness to the greatest number. This appeals 
to our sense of proportion and the general appro- 
priateness of things. It is big with human 
sympathy. Yet it cannot bear the acute scrutiny 
of experience by whose strict laws the empiricist 
believes it justified. Happiness as such cannot 
be universalized. It cannot even be objectified. 
There are no means known to man by which 
some moral legislature can add the various types 
and degrees of happiness which are likely to 
follow from any given line of action. In the 
practical working of this test our knowledge of 
society and its structure proves so vague that 
we find it quite impossible to prophesy with any 
degree of accuracy the happiness or unhappiness 
that may arise from any single moral decision. 



70 LIFE AS REALITY 

The influence of each action is so diffuse, like 
the waves excited on the surface of a pond, that 
we can have no appreciation of its value or 
extent. Happiness is not the same for us all, 
nor has the empiricist his own self-satisfaction 
to guide him in the determination of his particular 
interpretation of universal happiness, since no 
single action can produce the same quantity or 
intensity of happiness when repeated. All this is 
true because happiness cannot be objectified; 
it is personal. 

So here when the principle of expediency, 
the test of action according to experience, has 
been extended to embrace society, it is found to 
be merely relative. No vague formula of the 
world's happiness strikes to the heart of the 
immediate vividness of every human action. 
History shows us how futile are all the efforts 
of social expediency, throughout countless ages, 
to bring us nearer the Elysian fields of an earthly 
paradise. So the world since time immemorial 
has extended its principle of expediency from 
this life to the next. The eternal city is not 
Eome. The religious moralist, fearful lest the 
overburdening sin of the world should turn 
men's faces from the time-honored customs 



THE LAW OF LIFE 71 

of their fathers, has promised an ultimate justi- 
fication of human good and evil in the world to 
come. The Buddhists have invented a series 
of sensuous heavens and torturing hells in which 
the ceaseless law of Karma metes out to each his 
reward and his punishment. The Christians have 
contrasted a heaven paved with gold and precious 
stones in which the august majesty of God judges 
the quick and the dead with a hell stifling with the 
sulphurous fumes of eternal fires, where agonies 
interminable justify the ways of God to man. 
Such is the moral law based on eternal justice. 
Yet even such a justice does not render the 
principle of expediency ultimate. For if human 
action is to have value only on the grounds of 
reward and punishment in some "after reckoning 
taken on trust " then our human life degenerates 
into a system of bargaining in which the good 
is sold at one price and the evil at another. 
Nor is this principle of expediency universally 
authoritative, for there are many men who do 
not accept the dogma of a personal immortality. 
Life here on earth is more than a play of doubts, 
serious only to those who look forward to a 
retribution in another world. The basis of 
authority for action must come from practical 



72 LIFE AS REALITY 

life itself. Morality must be self-sufficient. It 
must stand justified in its own world of practical 
values. And this justification cannot be obtained 
from the relative, never absolute, motives of 
expediency. With this clearly before us, we 
turn to the second type of ethical theory, where 
the sanction of conduct is derived from some 
spiritual source. 



The conscience, the ten commandments, "the 
way of purity," and the Sermon on the Mount, 
represent the obligation to a spiritual moral law. 
This moral law is imposed from without, it 
acquires its strength because it is forced upon 
our life by a supreme power beyond the scope of 
our own finite experience. It commands with 
a kingly authority, it seems to rise up from the 
deep recesses of man's spiritual nature, from 
some source far removed from the petty things 
of our daily life. We follow it with childish 
timidity. We may even ascribe to it the final 
authority in this life of ours. 

The conscience, although speaking as an inner 
voice, is authoritative because it seems to come 
from beyond our own will. We respect an 



THE LAW OF LIFE 73 

authority which, it is not given us to question, 
we revere the "still small voice within," not 
because we have found this reverence rational, 
but because the conscience commands like a law 
vibrating through our nature from some unknown 
depth. Were we to consider the conscience as a 
part of our own personality it would lose this 
force and become merely one part of our being 
counseling another part. It would become more 
immediate and vital, — and in that sense more 
real to life, — but it would lose its objective 
authority. The conscience, in the sense of a 
moral sanction, is therefore objective in its 
nature. Yet if the conscience presumes to guide 
the motives of our life we cannot rest on this 
dogmatic avowal of authority. We must dis- 
cover the objective basis upon which the authority 
of the conscience rests. 

What is true of the conscience is likewise true 
of duty. We all feel its sovereign dignity, — 
"thou who art victory and law." The moral 
strength of the old Puritans lay in their venera- 
tion for duty. To them it was the final referen- 
dum of things human, the law unto itself supreme 
in the moral world. Yet the authority of duty, 
like that of conscience, cannot be pleaded with- 



74 LIFE AS REALITY 

out some ulterior basis. It must have a sanction 
beyond itself, for we inquire immediately, why 
is it right, why morally necessary, to follow with- 
out question the command of duty or the impera- 
tive of conscience. It is this " why " that gives 
duty and conscience their strength. It is also 
this "why" that makes us seek for a further 
justification. The old Indian Yoga where men 
did disagreeable things simply for self-abasement 
has ceased to be pertinent to our workaday 
world. Duty for duty's sake is unethical. Even 
the hermit in his hut and the monk in his cell 
require some ulterior motive to give vitality, 
even sanctity, to their daily routine of duties. To 
us, who may feel the stir of a world of action, 
however austere the authority of the "stern 
voice of God " may seem, still we must trace back 
this authority to a source which gives vitality 
to the external obligation of a law of life derived 
from the conscience or duty. 

The ultimate authority for these spiritual 
sanctions may be either external expediency or 
some religious value. In the former case the 
same relativity and insecurity which vitiated 
the ultimate value of all moral laws founded on 
expediency here destroys our confidence in the 



THE LAW OF LIFE 75 

conscience and duty as well. This has been 
obvious to those who believe in the final value 
of these spiritual sanctions, so their authority is 
sought for elsewhere than in the implications of 
mere experience. The connection of such laws 
of conduct as the conscience and duty with 
religion is as old as the history of our human 
institutions. There is undoubtedly a stage in 
the history of human society when it is expedient 
that justice and morality should have all the 
artificial support that custom, tradition and 
religious creed can afford. Savage tribes 
strengthened social expediency by the "taboo"; 
the early customs of the Jews, as the laws of 
Jehovah engraved on tablets of stone, assumed 
an authority unknown to human law. This is 
historical fact. But it proves not the least that 
the principles of moral actions and religion are 
inseparable. Social expediency in itself is not 
ultimate. With our present insight into life we 
have come to see that the alliance between 
principles of morality and the religious feeling 
has little permanent significance. "Oh! religion, 
what crimes have been committed in thy name! " 
is the oft-repeated cry of the victims of religious 
persecution. Under its white mantle cluster for 



76 LIFE AS REALITY 

protection the highest principles of moral con- 
duct and the depraved cruelties of brutalized 
sensuality. Eeligion and morality are essentially 
different. Eeligion is a feeling; it concerns 
itself with the relation of man to his world, 
humanity to its God. The law that gives unity 
to life concerns matters of daily action. In no 
sense is it a feeling; in no sense is it concerned 
with the problem of the universe. It is the 
practical living of life. 

Christ's morality is no stronger, as morality, 
because of its religious superstructure; the moral 
law is not justified, as a moral law, by basing its 
authority on the religious feeling. Matthew 
Arnold is right when he points out that the 
essence of Christianity is the simple morality of 
Christ; but this argues only for a hopeless 
confusion of the moral and the religious motives. 
We cannot remain satisfied with Mr. Casaubon's 
" Key to all the mythologies " even though that 
worthy pedant was actuated by the most laudable 
motives. We have at best a confused notion of 
conscience or duty, yet neither one is more 
clearly understood or given a firmer ethical basis, 
though it is supported by the still more illusive 
ranges of religious feeling. Even the great 



THE LAW OF LIFE 77 

thinker of Konigsberg is silent on this point. 
Kant found morality bound up in religion and 
religion in morality. Yet he fails to indicate the 
underlying conditions which make this mutuality 
possible. A basis there must be to the principles 
of human conduct, as well as to the conscience 
and to duty, if any confidence is to be placed in 
their authority. Yet this basis is not made 
clearer by transporting bodily the whole field of 
ethical values into the realm of religious obscurity. 
The moral law is omnipotent only within its own 
sphere. That sphere is life. That sphere is 
human personality. Conscience, duty, even 
religion itself must find, like expediency, their 
ultimate justification in life itself. They cannot 
give values to life, because it is fife that deter- 
mines their own values. As ideals they may 
perhaps embrace more and strike deeper than 
the older ethics of expediency, still, with them 
the unity of action lies external to life. What is 
external to life is not ultimate. In the deepest 
sense it is not real. 

Both of these theories of conduct, the empirical 
and the spiritual, are alike in the objective 
interpretation which they give to the underlying 
motives of our action. Both find the ultimate 



78 LIFE AS REALITY 

standard of human activity in some region of 
value capable of determining the conduct of 
men by an irreducible certainty of external 
authority. This certainty comes to life from 
without. It is objective. It is, therefore, valid 
only on the assumption that conduct can be 
understood from the outside. Both types of 
ethical theory assume that we can apply a kind 
of ethical microscope to our daily life and reach 
some universal basis for all human action. It is 
scientifically formal in its inductive reasoning. 
It assumes that actions, like cells and double stars, 
may be objectified before consciousness and the 
laws of their being laid bare. 



The law of life must be in life. This is the 
lesson of all efforts to find an external principle 
of action. These efforts fail because human 
activities cannot be reduced to general principles, 
like the movements of stars and germ cells. They 
cannot be thrown on a screen and minutely 
examined. Life, pulsating with its activity, is 
not the dead form of reality which we dismember 
in the vague formalism of our ethical analysis. 



THE LAW OF LIFE 79 

It is life, as a living reality, that makes for itself 
its own law. 

We must look for the principle of action nearer 
at hand. We must look for it in the very activity 
that brings it into being. This is our own 
individual life. We know absolutely nothing of 
the inner life of our fellow-beings. Their actions 
are, at the last analysis, as mysterious as the 
responses of the earthworm to light. That is 
why it is so difficult to legislate for another's 
moral actions; that is why experience and the 
conscience have each a limited significance. As 
principles of life they are artificial, they are not 
vital. If we could understand fife in its totality 
then we could interpret the moral color of another's 
experience and another's hopes and struggles. 
But we can't know life in its totality, simply 
because it can't be objectified. We are therefore 
driven backward into the recesses of our own 
inner activity. There is reality, there is finality. 
But human fife must have a balance. The springs 
of its activity cannot run rampant through nature. 
Man is lord of creation, but he is also his own 
master. The moral law shrinks and wizens to a 
mere shell in the presence of man's own life, but 
this very life, with all its reality aad its eternal 



80 LIFE AS REALITY 

mastery of the world, must be master of itself. 
It must carve out its own fate, for there is no 
external law to sit in judgment over it. 

Life knows but one law, and that is of its own 
making. It is the law of self-expression. It is 
an imperative dominating every sphere of human 
action — " Express thyself! Express the life that 
is in you! " Under the guidance of this inner 
law each life becomes organized after its own 
pattern, adhering only to the universal law of 
self-expression. It is supremely moral because 
it is life, it is reality. 

The ethical value of life is gauged by the full- 
ness of self-expression. It is an active, insistent 
world in which the human soul finds itself lodged, 
and the only response it can make to its whole 
environment is in terms of its single function, 
life, activity. We are what we have the capacity 
of doing. The completed deed is not ethical, only 
the act. The duty of our moral nature, deeper 
than all other duties, lies in expressing to the 
fullest that germ of life which lies within us. 
On a more concrete plane our duty is simply to 
do, in a workaday world, all that we have the 
capacity of doing. Goodness lies not in the good 
of the cause, for that is never attained, nor in the 



THE LAW OF LIFE 81 

accomplishment of a deed, for that becomes dead 
as soon as done, but simply and only in the self- 
expression which all acting and striving and 
struggling involves. The purpose of life is to 
live to the fullest in action and not in result. 
Degree in morality is merely the intensity of 
saturation of life-impulse infused into any moment. 
The only real evil in the world is the evil of 
failure to do. The only real good in the world is 
the good of action, of expression of the eternal 
"what next?" The law of life is felt, not known, 
but this is the ideal of that law so far as it can be 
crystallized in words. 

The ideal of self-expression gives unity to life. 
It stands for the inner meaning of those forms of 
the external moral law which proved inadequate 
to life because they were external. Expediency 
based on experience is valuable as a practical 
rule of living only as it contributes to the attain- 
ment of some end-purpose, which the individual 
deems worth striving for. Experience is the raw 
material of ethical values which is welded 
into our moral nature only so far as it con- 
tributes to the purposes of our wills. This is true 
also of universal happiness, — it is significant to 
life only as it forms a part of the struggles and 



82 LIFE AS REALITY 

ambitions of those who seek to realize it. In 
itself it is evil since it is finished. Conscience 
and duty have whatever truth they possess 
illumined by the inner fife effort which they help 
to express. They are evil, absolutely evil, if 
they lead to a mediaeval asceticism, good if 
they add stimulus and fullness to our ambitions. 
In this alone lies the importance of all those 
formal principles of conduct which the race has 
constructed for itself. They subserve some pur- 
pose beyond themselves, the purpose of self- 
expression, the purpose of thrusting forward into 
the world so much of reality as stands revealed 
within. 

Yet in all this individual self-expression there 
rises above the threshold of our single purposes 
the composite will of society. The individual 
finds his own self-expression is encompassed about 
by the co-ordinates of social forms. He finds 
that his own self-expression is not a matter of 
crude caprice, but is intimately bound up with 
the self-expression of others of his kind. To the 
institutions and values of society we, therefore, 
turn for a further expression of the reality of 
life. 



THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 

No man can live or die so much for himself as he that 
lives and dies for others. — Colton. 

All those principles of conduct which arise 
external to life itself fail to express the inner 
impulse which forces each into being. They fail 
moreover as formal principles of an ethical 
world, for they are inadequate to the richness of 
life as an immediate reality. But even individ- 
uality demands its setting. Life is revealed to 
us set in a social background, where law and 
order are not determined by the impulses and 
the purposes of a single person. Society looms 
above the horizon of our single aims. We strive 
to express that which is so intimately personal 
that we come to regard it as a part of our own 
self-expression, but, strangely enough, we find 
that our own self-expression is linked inseparably 
with that of others. A man cannot stand as a 
mere individual, an isolated unit in the maelstrom 

83 



84 LIFE AS REALITY 

of human society. His real self-expression, as a 
human being, lies in his capacity to reflect in 
his own particular way the larger social life 
which ebbs and flows about him. Individual 
morality is social morality. 

A formal law for life proves objective; so also 
is the law of the social whole. Social ethics are 
individual ethics magnified. Man reflects his 
own purposes and values into the world about him 
and calls them the conventions, the institutions 
and the moral principles of society. These are 
universal, not because they involve in themselves 
any inherent necessity, but because a majority 
of our fellow men call them so. Still they stand 
out in the vast organization which society has 
constructed for itself as the things for which it 
stands. Society in the strictest sense is nothing 
more than the massing of these external institu- 
tions which we impose upon it; it is they which 
seem to have the final reality and value toward 
which we as single persons blindly strive. We 
pass beyond the relativity of Hmited values. 
In the larger individuality which pulsates with 
the life of humanity we find a breadth and a 
scope which breaks down the partitions which 
separate men and substitutes social insti- 



THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 85 

tutions and ideals for individual interests and 
purposes. 

Society exists for individuals. All our social 
ideals go back to primitive springs of character. 
The fundamental institutions of society, such as 
the family, the clan and the nation, control men 
because they are based on simple traits of human 
nature. Civilization has not changed the rudi- 
ments of man's character; it has only smoothed 
the edges. Our progress upward has been social, 
but in that progress we have enveloped about us 
a covering of external forms, such as the institu- 
tions of the family and the state, much as the 
crustacean might its shell. These institutions 
exist primarily for the mutual advantage of the 
individuals concerned. The progress of mankind 
from the cave has constantly verified the belief 
that men will achieve greater individual self- 
expression when acting in conjunction with one 
another than when acting independently and 
alone. Yet beneath this social mutuality it 
must never be forgotten that society exists for 
the individual and not the individual for society. 
This is a fundamental truth notwithstanding 
the fact that all ethical values are reflected 
upward and outward into social values. 



86 LIFE AS REALITY 

The firmest and closest of all social institutions 
is the family. It involves the most precise social 
bond. To secure this definiteness it demands 
the subjugation of the single will to the will of a 
narrow intensive group whose welfare succeeds 
that of the single persons composing it. This 
strength of the bond, this coherence and homo- 
geneity, is essential for the continued existence 
of the family as an institution. The internal 
structure of the group must be limited and 
definite; its bond must be indisputable. When 
this bond becomes in the least indefinite the 
strength of the family as an element of society 
gradually disappears. This is shown historically, 
for as the family expanded to the clan and the 
clan to the nation the homogeneity of the original 
unit was lost in the general diffusion of responsi- 
bility. 

The higher levels of emotional and intellectual 
sympathy by which marriage and the family 
attain their full flower are based on the differ- 
entiation of sex together with the differ ence of 
emotional and intellectual attitudes which depend 
on this difference. This condition cannot be 
idealized away nor can any sanctity shed upon 
marriage by religion modify its nature. Originally 



THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 87 

it had significance merely as a mutual agreement 
or contract in the light of which society sanctions 
the gratification of a primitive passion. Such 
was marriage among the Greeks and the early 
Teutons. Efforts on the part of many idealists 
to raise marriage to levels of absolute truth and 
value too often savor of an inclination to lend 
their philosophy to the justification and ennoble- 
ment of what they emotionally feel to be true. 
It is social expediency which has justified marriage 
in the form that we find it, but a social expediency 
which has proved its value through the moral 
influences which it has shed upon the persons 
composing the family group. On its highest 
levels, unfortunately not always realized, the 
family is a great moral force enabling individuals 
to attain through its medium a higher state of 
self-expression. 

The primitive purpose of the family is the 
continuance of the race under conditions most 
favorable to individual and social progress. 
This is purely a practical matter. The higher 
the species in the scale of animal life and the 
higher the stage of society in its social life the 
longer the young require protection. The experi- 
ence of the past has shown that this is best 



88 LIFE AS REALITY 

obtained under conditions of strong parental 
feeling and where struggle or competition in 
childhood is minimized. On the lower planes 
of ignorance and incompetency mere increase of 
the human species is fraught with hopeless misery, 
want and degeneracy. Charity and philanthropy 
in the city slums are as nothing compared with 
the importance of checking the birth rate where 
conditions are unfavorable to the proper devel- 
opment of children. Evolution would teach its 
glaring lessons to the philanthropist and the 
practical sociologist, but they are blind. The 
struggle of incompetents with incompetents will 
adjust itself to human progress, but it will work 
out its iron law through the relentless slaughter 
of those unwilling or unable to conform to moral 
and social ideals. Comparatively few now living 
will have descendants a thousand years from now, 
but these few are the chosen seed, not by a 
scriptural commandment, but by the law of 
nature which perpetuates the moral and the 
strong but stamps out the immoral and the weak. 
This is the fundamental duty of the family — to 
make possible better individuals, not merely 
more. 

The deeper significance of the family is not 



THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 89 

biological, but teleological. It Helps to the self- 
expression of individual human beings. One 
generation devotes itself to the raising of the 
next, and this in its turn to the raising of another. 
Is all this human effort not an endless and 
self-contradictory process, without significance 
or permanent value, unless the individuals at 
each stage express in themselves a separate and 
distinct reality? Social values do not lose them- 
selves in some vague Utopia — they stand out in 
the eternal now. And the family, like any other 
social form, must justify itself in the immediate 
reality of the present. This present is real only 
for human beings, never for institutions. 

The family exists for individuals, not the 
individuals for the family. The latter is at 
present expedient, and therefore of relative 
value. But this social expediency gives to it, 
as an institution, as a social form, no ring of 
absoluteness. Historically it arose, and pre- 
sumably it will pass. It was of slight importance 
in the Spartan state and Plato's ideal republic 
relegates it to an insignificant value. It is at 
most a middle term between the singleness of the 
individual and the multiplicity of society. Like 
the rhythmic movements of vast cosmic forces 



90 LIFE AS REALITY 

the present social tendencies bring the antithesis 
of the individual and society not only into more 
marked juxtaposition, but also into greater 
harmony. If the family in any particular instance 
leads to a greater individuality among its members, 
to greater opportunities of self-expression, then 
it serves its purpose in that particular instance. 
Its influence for good is centered in its individuals, 
but penetrates outward to society. It helps to 
the self-expression of the human beings who are 
always massed within the social group. There 
is the criterion of its value, for alone the family 
is merely a conventional step between the one 
and the social many. 



Broader than the blood-clan stands the political 
unit. The historian of society tells us that in the 
early times when the customs of the race were 
forming, the family gradually enlarged its limits 
and assumed duties which slowly transformed 
it into a primitive state. Once the definite 
limits of the family were broken down the step 
from the clan to the vast empire was merely a 
matter of time and natural selection in the 
struggle for political prominence. 



THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 91 

The state, as an abstract universal, is made 
up of single persons. What distinct reality the 
state in itself possesses arises through the relations 
which these persons bear to each other and to 
the traditions and ideals of their country. The 
membership in a state must mean something to the 
life of the citizens. This something is of the 
nature of a bond which they both feel and rever- 
ence. It may be reduced to the f eeling of patriot- 
ism and the acknowledgment of law. Patriotism 
is the subjective attitude of individuals toward 
the somewhat figurative expression "my country," 
with all the institutions and ideals for which 
it stands. Legal authority represents the con- 
trol of the social will over the members of the 
group. Patriotism is a kind of clan sympathy. 
It is a feeling of loyalty, veneration and respect. 
It wells up from a man's soul, — the pride of race, 
kinship and institutional ideals. Law, on the 
contrary, is external; it is not subjective and 
personal. It stands for what authority the 
political group is capable of extending over the 
individuals within its borders. It is essentially 
restraint and depends on magistrates and correct- 
ive means for its enforcement. 

The personal feeling of patriotism and the 



92 LIFE AS REALITY 

external authority of the law are opposite to 
one another. Both are, however, equally essen- 
tial to the stability of the state. By the sub j e cti ve 
feeling of the one the individuals consent to 
revere the state; by the objective force of the 
other the state retains its authority over the 
individuals. The integrity of the state lasts only 
so long as there is a normal equilibrium between 
these two. If, through the amalgamation of 
states, the political unit grows to such an extent 
that patriotism must needs be dissipated through 
a heterogeneous mass without apparent internal 
principles of unity, then the authority of the state 
becomes so diffuse that it is no longer able to 
hold the separate parts together. When patriot- 
ism loses its focus, then law loses its authority. 
This may be illustrated historically. The strength 
of the early Greek state lay in the excess of 
subjective feeling over objective control, in the 
excess of patriotism over the binding authority 
of the law. The Athenians flocked to the 
standards of Miltiades and Alcibiades not because 
of the authority of their mother city, but because 
of the intensity of the feeling for the Hellenic 
race. During the last centuries of imperial 
Kome the conditions were opposite to those of 



THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 93 

Greece. Owing to the constant union of nation 
after nation the empire had grown so cumber- 
some, its authority so diffuse and the feeling of 
its citizens toward it so weak and abstract that 
the nice adjustment of subjective patriotism to 
external law was disturbed. Each separate dis- 
trict established a new and more concrete center 
of patriotism and law. 

The estimate of the kind of reality and the 
depth of value attributable to the state rests upon 
an estimate of the fundamental significance of 
patriotism and law together with all that these 
imply. Patriotism expresses the feeling of the 
individual toward the state. It is essentially 
self-centered, yet as a feeling productive of 
actions it must be measured by the larger values 
of right and wrong. These are not merely 
individualistic, but of universal character. They 
transcend the limited scope of one's own personal 
feelings and the somewhat accidental conditions 
upon which these depend. They carry us backward 
into the background of social good. Such expres- 
sions as "my country, right or wrong" mean 
little else than a vague and childish intensity of 
feeling. The policy of a country is determined 
by the crude massing of individual wills. It is, 



94 LIFE AS REALITY 

therefore, no more certain to be right than the 
actions of a single person. There may be a blind 
loyalty to the abstraction "my country," but 
this can have little reference to the immediate 
or remote purpose for which this loyalty stands. 
If patriotism is to refer to an entire political 
unit, why limit it to a single nationality? " My 
country " and its flag are abstract symbols. If 
these stand for nothing more than traditions 
then the state has no deeper reality than the 
storied pages of outworn history. If they stand 
for the future only, then we must remember that 
each state follows the same road of mortality 
to which individuals and nations are joint heirs. 
If they stand for ideals, why sever them from 
the ideals of humanity? Is not the feeling 
toward humanity stronger than that toward a 
single group? Ideals cannot be restricted to 
states. They arise from loyalty to society. 

The relativity of the state to society as a whole 
is further illustrated by the nature of the law. 
Social relations demand the subjection of the 
individual will to that of the group. To insure 
this end the state has long since established, on 
the ground of general expediency, certain well- 
defined paths of conduct. Its ability to enforce 



THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 95 

these lines of conduct on the individuals depends 
on the strength of the state itself and the general 
rationality of its laws. At all events the limits 
which determine the duty of the governed to 
observe the law are the limits of social expediency. 
The purpose of the law is declared to be the 
establishment of justice. It is therefore relative 
to the end which it subserves. Justice, even 
among single persons, is a conception of rich and 
varied ethical coloring, but social justice is even 
more delicate and intangible. In every case the 
ulterior purpose of justice goes beyond the narrow 
conception of law as confined to the single state 
and embraces the whole of humanity. 

Law is relative to the ends of society. In 
itself it involves no innate necessity. It is a 
means to an end, not an end in itself, notwith- 
standing the halo of sanctity with which jurists 
habitually surround the law. If at any time 
laws cease to meet the requirements which the 
social group demands of them, if they fail to 
appreciate the delicate adjustment of individual 
and social values, lopping off here too much and 
there too little, then it becomes the right and 
the duty of society to readjust the law to its new 
demands. If the law fails utterly in its function 



96 LIFE AS REALITY 

society may grasp the scepter from its enervated 
hand and rule in its own name. This is the 
spirit of social progress so far as it comes within 
the influence of legal sanction. It shows the 
relativity of the law to social expediency. It 
shows that the law of a single state is relative 
to the larger law of humanity. 

Yet the state, with its patriotism and its 
law, possesses in itself a value, like that of the 
institution of the family, even though this may 
be relative to a larger social value. This intrinsic 
value lies in the opportunity for the expression of 
life-purposes which the state affords; the ideals 
of patriotism and national loyalty do count for 
something in themselves, because they mean 
something to the human being who struggles for 
them and sacrifices for them. They represent 
to the patriot the stimulus to self-expression, 
and in that stimulus he finds a true reality 
because he finds a value that is real to life. The 
means here justifies the end. Yet it is not the 
meaning of patriotism as a logical concept nor 
the ends to which patriotism leads that count. 
These are relative like all else. But it is the fact 
that in working for these ends some human 
individual feels an insistent struggle and passion 



THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 97 

for self-expression, and through this very feeling 
makes the ends real. The martyr to his country 
gets his reality by making the cause a part of 
himself, by throwing himself into the vortex of 
the struggle. He makes what appears external 
and formal to become subjective and vital. 
The concept " my country " counts for something 
in the life activity of those who believe in it, 
and that makes it real. 



As an objective form, aside from its meaning 
to human life, the state is relative to the larger 
social background, and derives its value from its 
social setting. The family and the state mediate 
between the individual and society. Whatever 
significance they possess finds its justification 
in individual values on the one hand and in 
social values on the other. The individual and 
society are extremes of one another, but extremes 
which, like points on the surface of a sphere, He 
close together. Society is brought into the 
foreground as one focuses the attention either 
toward or away from the individual. The con- 
ditions of life under which we all live are. of so 



98 LIFE AS REALITY 

complex a character that no single person alone 
and unaided is able to raise himself above the 
level of a ceaseless struggle for mere existence. 
We progress through mutual effort. The self- 
expression of the single individual can be ade- 
quately realized only with the aid of strong 
social forces. Every movement, therefore, which 
seems to look toward individualism emphasizes 
much more the paramount importance of the 
social organization. The social whole takes the 
place of the individual unit, social values become 
superimposed on individual values. 

Social values arise through the organization of 
members of a group. The starting point of all 
values lies in the individual and in the end it is he 
who justifies social values. This is the back- 
ground upon which all sociology must rest. In 
the cry of the socialist and the communist we 
must listen for the echo of individualism. Society 
with its intricate organization means much, 
but it can never mean more than what is revealed 
to the living personalities within. There is 
perhaps a mob psychology which is different 
from the mental life of the single person; there is 
perhaps a code of ethics which rises into the fore- 
ground only as a result of extreme intricacies of 



THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 99 

complex social intercourse. Still notwithstanding 
all this no group psychology or sociology can ever 
get back of the simple lesson that society is made 
up of single persons and it is they alone who 
inherit whatever of worth our social machinery 
may lead to. The lesson of all this is that social 
values must embrace the intimate personal 
values of those within society, else they have no 
value in themselves. 

Any account of the laws and organization of 
society must begin with an account of the indi- 
vidual. The chief task of any scientific sociology, 
— a task too often hardly mentioned, — lies in the 
understanding of the principles beneath the 
transition from the single individual to society 
as the over-individual. The transition must be 
made. It cannot be passed ov sc with a belief that 
a catalogue of the duties of society contains all 
that there is in a philosophy of social values. 
This transition may be expressed in the light of 
one of two opposite motives. Either society 
may be explained as an organization of individuals 
in which the stress of emphasis is laid from the 
beginning to the end upon the individuals, or else 
society may claim for itself the supreme value 
and crush the individuals, like the car of Jugger- 



100 LIFE AS REALITY 

naut, beneath its ponderous wheels. It is all a 
matter of emphasis, but a matter of emphasis 
which spells progress or degeneration. In the 
one case there is social organization, in the 
other case there is socialism. In the one case 
there is social progress because the individuals 
of which society is composed retain their full 
significance, in the other case there is de- 
generation because socialism suppresses the value 
of personality and can substitute nothing in its 
place. 

Socialism, in the sense in which the term is 
ordinarily used, involves the extinction of the 
individual in society. It does not involve the 
strengthening of the individual through society. 
Socialism would blot out personality as a distinct 
force in this world of ours. It would reduce us all 
to cogs in a great social mechanism and stultify 
ambition and personal reward. The question 
involved is not whether socialism is practical or 
desirable from a low economic point of view. 
The vital question is whether or not the values of 
individual personality retire into the background 
as those of the social mechanism press forward 
into the foreground. Personality is as sacred as 
anything else connected with human life. The 



THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 101 

socialist would sacrifice this in the hopes that the 
social unit, when magnified beyond all limits, 
would supply some higher expression of value. 
In this the socialist forgets that the only heirs 
to inherit social values are the individuals com- 
posing society. Society itself is nothing but an 
organized group of personalities. There is no 
huge Leviathan with muscles and sinews and 
brain. The socialist loses all perspective in the 
blind adoration of his abstraction, for he tries to 
state the problem of social welfare without hav- 
ing first determined the conditions of individual 
welfare. Such an undertaking is as crude and 
narrow as it is unscientific and contradictory. 
Society, as the organization of individuals, exists 
for the positive purpose of permitting the largest 
expression of personality, not for the negative 
purpose of stifling it. 

This expression of personality is impossible 
without individual struggle and effort involving, 
as perhaps it must, the apparent defeat of our 
limited purposes. Social organization is the oppo- 
site of socialism, because it emphasizes the para- 
mount importance of the individual. Its problem 
is how individuality may be broadened and 
deepened. Theoretically it may be stated as 



102 LIFE AS REALITY 

the search for that social structure which permits 
the largest opportunity for self-expression and 
self-development, — in a word, the greatest indi- 
viduality. Practically it is the adjustment of 
individual initiative so that there shall be the 
maximum achievement for each. Stifle the in- 
dividual initiative and we stifle the precious 
germplasm which alone makes possible the 
evolution of society. The individual and society 
are reciprocals of each other. No one can labor 
for the achievement of social good without at 
the same time attaining a fuller expression of 
his own individual good. This is the lesson 
of social cooperation, but it is not the lesson of a 
crude socialism. 

It is in mutual cooperation, in organization, 
that the true value of the social unit becomes 
apparent. The individual reaches out for a 
larger expression of personality. He would find 
it in the family, but the family is at best an 
intermediate form, the value of which is soon 
obscured in the social whole; he would find it in 
the state, but the value of the state is relative 
to society. Social organization is both means 
and end. It gives value to the fragmentary 
intentions and purposes of individual lives. Its 



THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 103 

end is the largest and fullest expression of 
life. 



Social organization is the last of a long chain of 
values. It cannot, however, be without a motive 
of its own. It cannot be final in itself unless it 
expresses in itself a realization of value sufficiently 
broad for all relative values. In this would lie 
its reality. This it seeks to express in its motive, 
its ideal. The ideal of society is social progress. 
Yet this progress is never conceived as a conscious 
motive, a clearly formed and well-articulated 
purpose, by that very social organization which 
seeks to express it. Society moves forward by 
the independent effort of separate lives, organized 
in harmony with each other. But society itself 
is powerless to understand the fundamental 
purposes which determine its so-called progress. 
Just as the individual looks upward to society 
for his final value, society in its turn looks within 
its own fife-plan for some fundamental reality. 
But its search is in vain. Society has no mind 
of its own, no consciously realized ideal before 
whose final court of adjustment all social ends are 
brought into the sweep of one great social purpose. 



104 LIFE AS REALITY 

Whatever intrinsic value society may grasp is lost 
in a single moment. It is engulfed in a current 
that knows not whither it is flowing. 

Social progress is essentially a process of trial 
and error. In this process neither society nor 
the individuals within have a clear idea of the 
motive; they cannot understand the final ideal 
which each successive stage apparently seeks to 
approximate. Social progress moves forward 
like a man on a mountain enveloped in a cloud. 
He feels the rising ground beneath his feet but 
never sees the distant peak toward which he is 
groping. We may speak of a social better or a 
social worse, but these terms have little significance 
because the standard of judgment is never seen. 
Society has no conception of its own independent 
reality; it cannot therefore determine a final value 
for either itself or for the various institutions 
within its organization. Some deeper principle 
of ideal unity is demanded. This must come to 
society from a sphere of ultimate reality, since 
it cannot arise within the social unit itself. 
Society turns to the realm of religious feeling for 
the source of its supreme ideal, because religion 
would bind all relative values into the harmony 
of one Infinite Purpose. For us there remains, 



THE CALL OF THE WHOLE 105 

however, the deeply significant lesson that all 
social values, whatever their nature, are relative 
to the supreme value of the individual, the human 
personality for whose self-expression and indi- 
viduality all the forms of social organization find 
their existence and their meaning* 



VI 



RELIGION 

If man sleeps on, untaught by what he sees, 
Can he prove infidel to what he feels? 

Young 

We are dimly conscious of relative values in 
our world of ethical and social activities. These 
relative expressions are not sufficient in them- 
selves. They require a realm of values based on 
a consciousness beyond our own. We speak of 
a better and a worse, an advanced and a decadent 
civilization, according as the values we reflect 
into social conditions agree or disagree with some 
dimly conceived standard. All this emphasizes 
the vague longing of the human soul for some 
permanent reality beyond the limitations of 
sense and feeling. This longing has been mirrored 
by the race in its religion. It is in the divine 
will interpreted by Buddha, Christ or Mohammed 
that the race has ever looked for the permanent 
value of its social order and its ethical purposes. 

106 



RELIGION 107 

All lesser motives and lower ideals become 
sanctified by the religious spirit and their own 
relative value becomes absolute when illumined 
by the divine reality. 

Social values, like other human values, demand 
a place in the religious consciousness. The things 
which mean most for society are measured by 
conceptions which seem to lead beyond the social 
order. Social progress to those within its current 
is distinctly a question of practical conditions. 
Any final value which may emerge above the 
threshold of the social consciousness is not to be 
expressed in terms of social values alone, but 
rather in terms of a still more inclusive conscious- 
ness. The reformer never clearly understands the 
ultimate ends toward which he is working, but 
is aware only of a general desire to better the 
condition of his fellow men. He achieves 
practical results only so far as this general desire 
becomes crystallized in a definite and finite task. 
Yet he vaguely hopes that his work may not be 
without permanent significance in the Divine 
Consciousness. 

No one doubts the universality of religion. 
It appears at every stage of society, in every 
form of ethnic culture and in every age of the 



108 LIFE AS REALITY 

world's history. Broadly speaking, differences 
among religions are more superficial than vital. 
Throughout all ranges of mental and social life 
we have felt the need of something permanent 
and invariant beneath the shifting scenes of life. 
Unconsciously we look behind the vanishing 
present, beyond the vista of a single life and 
read the meaning of the world in terms of a Divine 
Permanence. From time immemorial men have 
called this eternal value Spirit and have clothed 
it with the majesty of the human mind. They 
have called It Creator, Father, Lord. 



Our whole outlook on life is determined very 
largely by the environment in which we happen 
to be born. Human nature is much the same 
in the Indian, the Greek and the Celt, but the 
customs, traditions and superstitions which sur- 
round men from earliest youth react on a plastic 
and unformed material. The man is, within 
broad limits, what the environment has made 
him. This is especially pertinent in matters of 
religious belief. The Anglo-Saxon is a Christian 
because in the distant past Saint Augustine 



RELIGION 109 

landed on the stormy shores of Britain and 
preached the gospel of Christ to our forefathers. 
The Asiatic of to-day is a Buddhist because some 
two thousand years ago a prince of the house of 
Gautama was born beneath Indian skies who 
taught to the ancient Hindoos the gospel of 
charity and peace. We take our creed much as 
we find it. We make it a collective or social 
function with the result that all religions depend, 
to a large extent, upon a certain uniformity of 
belief among their adherents. This cannot be 
obtained by the mere personal feeling itself as 
there would be as many forms as there were 
worshipers. Some common ground of dogmatic 
faith and ritual is necessary in order to insure the 
uniformity and therefore the permanent stability 
of the religion. Nor can personal reflection be 
relied upon to achieve this result. An intellectual 
religion in which each thought out the basis of 
his belief is conceivable, but has never been even 
remotely realized. It would lose the force of 
" social feeling "; it would lack organization and 
above all else vividness of appeal. Eeligions, 
therefore, have never emphasized the individual 
character of belief, whether founded on emotion 
or reflective experience. They have sought 



110 LIFE AS REALITY 

instead to organize the separate beliefs of their 
adherents into a well-defined uniformity of 
ritual and creed. This uniformity is obtained 
through the common ground of faith. 

The antithesis, faith and knowledge, may mean 
much or little according to the meaning and the 
stress of emphasis given to faith. It is almost 
needless to remark that every mental process 
contains both an element of irrational belief 
and an element of knowledge. The proposition, 
"one and one make two," may be considered a 
fact of unquestioned knowledge, but even there 
the faith element is present. Even this simplest 
act of reasoning must assume, but cannot prove, 
the power of the mind. This assumption is not 
a matter of knowledge. We believe that the 
processes of reason will not play us false, but 
of this there is no positive assurance other than 
that vouchsafed by simple faith. In the sense of 
the belief in something beneath direct empirical 
proof, faith is therefore as elementary and 
necessary as any other phase of mental life. 

The faith in our ordinary reasoning is a faith 
that tends to reinforce and supplement the 
rational powers of the mind. It does not try 
to establish an authority superior to them. 



RELIGION 111 

We must have faith in the reason which enables 
us to say "one plus one are two," because rational 
thought on all levels would be impossible were it 
not for this simple assurance in the native powers 
of the human mind. But this is a different faith 
from that of religion. The belief in the miraculous 
birth of Buddha or in the divinity of Christ are 
offered by religion as immediate objects of. be- 
lief, not requiring the correlative sanction of 
the reason. Keligion is the only great field of 
human values that takes this position, the only 
sphere where men are asked to believe what they 
are not permitted at the same time to subject 
to the ordinary tests of experience and reason. 

The question is not in regard to the truth 
of any of the great religious dogmas, but merely 
of the manner in which they are presented. 
Faith would reach truth by a direct means. It 
would establish an immediate ground for the 
religious consciousness which is neither in experi- 
ence nor in the reason, but more certain than 
either. It would establish a court of appeal of 
its own. " Salvation by faith" prescribes an 
ideal to be attained through mere belief, irrespect- 
ive of the relation of this belief to other forms of 
knowledge. But this mere act of belief is an act 



112 LIFE AS REALITY 

of reason, since it is possible to either accept or 
reject the statement presented. Faith, there- 
fore, involves a contradiction, — " Eeason to accept 
faith, which transcends the reason." 

Dogmatic faith would give to religion a basis 
of permanent reality. Yet how are the values 
and the truths of faith to be correlated with other 
values, human and social, which depend on 
reflection and not on mere belief? Faith deter- 
mines one region of truth. From this region all 
other values are distinct unless there is some 
intimate bond of connection. This religion denies 
because by admitting such a bond there would 
be involved a connection and, therefore, a mutual 
dependence between rational values and faith 
values. We cannot acknowledge, therefore, that 
dogmatic faith is able to define a permanent 
reality beneath those lesser relative values which 
rise out of our human experience and human 
reflection. 

Religion, made social by the mould of a common 
faith, is thus in no unassailable position. The 
most that a common ground of faith can do is 
to extend the individual religious experience 
so that it may be reinforced by a common assent. 
But this adds not the least to its grasp on reality, 



RELIGION 113 

nor to its ability to determine ideals for moral 
and social values. Historically it has proved 
inadequate to the task, as the blackened pages 
of the Spanish Inquisition and the horrors of 
religious persecutions too plainly show. Perhaps 
it was these silent witnesses of the past which 
once led a great thinker to liken the religious 
consciousness to the damp soil of the forest 
from which all kinds of rank weeds spring. The 
religious cult, founded on the community of 
faith, is the result of social conditions, and not a 
cause in determining them. It is the wax and 
not the die. 



It is not in the superstitions of the religious 
cult that the true religious feeling is found. If 
religion is to express the final reality it should 
express the deepest values of the human spirit. 
Its plea for recognition lies in the intimacy with 
which it may reflect the depths of an immediate 
personal consciousness. But if this reflection 
represents only the social reflex, religion loses 
its prerogative. True religious feeling must be 
subjective and personal. The moment it becomes 
objective and impersonal it ceases to have 



114 LIFE AS REALITY 

significance as an independent human value 
and becomes merely a phase of our social institu- 
tions. The religion established by the sword, the 
word of a monarch or the still stronger commands 
of social convention is merely an external form. 
Yet, if it is to afford the groundwork of reality 
for the social order, it must legislate to society 
and not mirror a still more universal social 
consciousness. It must speak authoritatively 
from the inner recesses of personality. This was 
the advance of Buddhism over the earlier cults 
of India, of Christianity over Judaism, of 
Protestantism over Catholicism, of Puritanism 
over the English Church. 

True religion ebbs up as the personal response 
to a great reflective or emotional experience. 
There and there alone stands the religious con- 
sciousness stripped of the artificialities of custom 
and superstition, — religion in its purest and 
simplest form. There and there alone religion 
appears as the cry of some soul in the throes of 
doubt and pessimism, the cry of a soul longing 
for peace beyond mind and sense. Such was the 
religion of Saint Augustine, of Boehme and of 
Bunyan. To each seer religion came as a great 
truth, a light in a world of darkness, a refuge of 



RELIGION 115 

strength, among wrongs and weaknesses. In 
their extreme feeling each called the religious 
consciousness immediate and its truth a direct 
revelation of God to one human being. In this 
form, as a personal revelation, religion stands 
purest and best able to justify itself as the 
final reality underlying all our human relative 
values. 

It is the attitude of mind and the mental setting 
that separates religion from all else. The religious 
experience is essentially a personal reaction born 
under extreme stress. The setting in which it 
appears in the mind gives to it a vivid emotional 
coloring. This emotional luster always forms 
the broad background of the religious experience, 
even though reflective ideas are pushed forward 
as if they were of vital consequence. It is a 
feeling of communion between man's soul and 
the soul of the universe which reflects, like a 
mirror, God's purposes in men's thoughts. Indeed 
of such importance is it that one of the most 
liberal theologians of the last hundred years 
characterized religion as little else than feeling. 
Whether or not the psychology of the religious 
consciousness can consistently assume this posi- 
tion is largely a matter of empirical evidence, 



116 LIFE AS REALITY 

but no description of religion can disregard this 
large emotional element. 

It is an immediate fact of consciousness that 
what goes under the name of feeling has an 
important place in life. This cannot be denied. 
In the end it is the only means by which we know 
of life as an immediate personal reality. The 
satisfaction of self-expression which is in the end 
the dearest thing in life is known to each one of 
us only as it is felt. No intellectual process 
alone can ever make us feel life as a reality. All 
this is true and it shows how important is the 
psychological activity which we call feeling in 
the values of life. But it does not show that 
the form in which this activity appears in the relig- 
ious consciousness has an independent reality, a 
reality which may serve as a basis for all our 
human values. Feeling can and must express 
what is individually real as this is revealed in 
life, but religion would objectify this purely 
personal feeling and make it universal. It would, 
in its own way, do exactly what science tried to 
do, — namely, make objective and general what 
must always remain subjective and individual. 

Religion cannot make its element of feeling 
objective and universal. The religious feeling 



RELIGION 117 

has no greater prerogative than what feeling in 
itself represents. The sphere of things obj ective is 
the sphere of the intellect where truth is reached 
through rational processes. But religion would 
cut the Gordian knot. It would extend the 
confines of feeling so as to embrace a concept 
of universal objective reality. Eeligion fails in 
this effort to reach final reality simply because 
the form in which feeling occurs in our human 
consciousness is individual, and the form which 
religion demands of it in order to reach its reality 
is over-individual and objective. 

The significance that the religious feeling 
possesses is not original in the religious conscious- 
ness, but is borrowed directly from life. One 
cannot reiterate too often that feeling has a 
place in life. The religious consciousness, as 
one expression of that feeling, cannot be set aside. 
It has a value, but a value which arises only 
through its setting in the whole of consciousness, 
in the whole of life. This is very far from 
ascribing to it an ultimate reality quite its own. 
Religious feeling is a part of life; it stands for a 
certain effort of the human spirit to objectify its 
own inner feeling in the vast totality of universal 
values. This effort, relative though it is, proves 



118 LIFE AS REALITY 

perhaps above all else, how deeply significant 
is feeling itself to life. 

The religious experience, as the response of the 
human soul under the spell of a deep emotion, 
possesses, then,. a relative but not absolute value. 
But in this relativity to life, religion derives its 
strength and its permanence. This is the lesson 
of the religious consciousness stripped of all the 
external forms of creed and dogma, the lesson that 
in the end the value of religion as a force in life 
lies in its emphasis on the power of the human 
personality to make real before consciousness 
what the deep feeling for its own reality involves. 
The objectification may be wrong, but not so 
the immediate feeling for life and personality. 
That is reality. 



But the religious feeling is not content with 
merely obj ectif ying itself as feeling. It must have 
a center, an ideal embodiment. There is a force 
within our minds which impels us to revere and 
worship some power greater than ourselves 
enduring above destruction and change. The 
highest, noblest idea our own mind can symbolize 
is the deep and eternal mystery of personality. 



RELIGION 119 

It is natural, therefore, that in the supreme 
ecstasy of religious feeling we should depict the 
God of our world as a person. Religious feeling 
must have an object. We cannot have a feeling 
toward a mere ideal, unless this is made vivid by 
being made real to us as living human beings. 
We see divinity as a person, we see ourselves as 
reflecting the divine. This Divine Personality, 
at first the creation of a crude animism, develops 
as the race develops into the Supreme Deity of 
the higher forms of the religious consciousness. 
The savage beheld the awful powers of nature. 
He revered them. He reflected his own conscious- 
ness into the world about him and called that 
consciousness eternal spirit. The human heart 
yearns for affection in the great heart of nature, — 
Zeus-pater and the fatherhood of God. It cries 
out for a divine sympathy that shall touch its own 
afflictions and in answer to this yearning religious 
feeling creates its belief in the Divine Personality. 
This yearning does not arise from what is con- 
ceived to be necessary in order to give a final 
reality to relative values; it is based rather on 
what best serves the purposes of the religious 
experience. Belief in the Divine Personality 
involves the knowledge of just those conditions 



120 LIFE AS REALITY 

which belong to divinity. Only by such knowl- 
edge can our human consciousness span the 
chasm between humanity and God with any 
confidence in the truth and the value of this 
supreme effort of the mind. This knowledge 
cannot be supported by such artificial stagings as 
miracles, because such events, even if absolutely 
authentic, prove only at best an extraordinary 
power. They do not prove to us the manifesta- 
tion of Divinity, because we have no deeper 
knowledge to tell us that miracles are a necessary 
attribute of the portrayal of Divinity. 

The belief in Divinity, in the religious sense, is 
thus identical with a knowledge of all the con- 
ditions and attributes which are conceived as 
necessary in order to raise the mere concept 
of the Divine Personality from the possible of 
thought to the actual of reality. This breadth of 
understanding is something which the human 
mind cannot attain, since by the very presupposi- 
tions of the Divine Personality, as the ideal of 
the religious feeling, such a supreme knowledge 
lies beyond the scope of our finitely determined 
rational powers. Christ's Divinity, for example, 
cannot be actually grasped by the religious 
consciousness since we cannot understand the 



RELIGION 121 

grounds which might make it possible to apply 
the attributes of divinity to a human person. 
To recognize God in man involves a knowledge 
of God Himself. We know personality only on its 
human level, and the step upward to the Divine 
Personality can be made only by some tran- 
scendent intuition into whose shadowy confines 
it is not given us to penetrate. 

Like religious feeling the belief in the Divine 
Personality has its value in life. It indicates 
how significant to our daily needs and to the 
abstract concepts of our mind is the import of 
Personality. It indicates, too, that the reality 
which we crave, through the extension of person- 
ality to the abstract universal of God, is a reality 
which has its origin in ourselves. Through the 
Divine Personality the human consciousness finds 
a medium for expressing the deep reality of its 
own life. This is religion in its purity. 



The grasp of religion on the reality of lif e is not 
ultimate; it does not give us anything final. 
Yet religion has a deep significance in the sum 
total of our world. This significance lies in its 



122 LIFE AS REALITY 

portrayal of an inner impulse for self-expression. 
Keligion vainly tries to extend this feeling beyond 
the human personality to the Divine Personality, 
but fails because feeling cannot be objectified 
into the universal form of an over-personality 
similar to our own selves. Yet when its full 
scope is understood, and a normal limit placed 
on its ambitions, feeling is seen to be merely a 
feeling for the deep reality of life. The realities 
which religion seeks to grasp cast us back onto the 
realities of life. 

If religion has any meaning to human beings, 
as it certainly has, that meaning must be express- 
ible in terms of life, for under no other conditions 
is it real to men. In the religious feeling our 
human soul seeks to give clearness of form to 
this passion for life, — and religion on its formal 
side is this articulate expression. Every impulse 
of religion on its lowest and its highest levels is a 
groping for a larger life. Unfortunately, savage 
religions are ordinarily appealed to in order to 
prove almost anything regarding religion, yet 
one cannot have the least familiarity with a 
single primitive cult without being impressed 
with the savage's thirst for more life, for a larger 
life. He loves activity and in that sense, perhaps, 



RELIGION 123 

comes nearer to reality than ourselves. But 
above all, his religion expresses this love of life; 
his gods are human beings endowed with life 
greater than his own. His gods become more 
powerful and more definite as they become more 
human. His immortality is a longing for more 
life; it is a demand on nature much more than a 
clearly formed belief. It is merely the inner 
feeling, — the eternal reality of life. 

With this feeling religion closes its volume, 
rich with the hope and anguish of unnumbered 
generations. It stands for a form of reality, 
because it stands for a form of life, — that form 
which seeks to reflect our own life outward into 
nature and make ourselves one with its God. 
In a sense it is right, in a sense it has mastered 
reality, because it would make all things living 
after man's own image. But the God which it 
creates is not the Divine Personality, universal 
in the sense of being objective. Its God is life, 
because its reality is life. 



VII 

TKUTH 

And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make 
you free. — St. John. 

Human experience in all its ranges seeks for 
truth. It is an ideal to which all other ideals 
must conform. Eelative values on all levels, 
human, social and divine, feel the influence of this 
ideal. Society, trying to lift itself and its 
members upward to some plane of greater relative 
value, is incapable of grasping its own ideal. It 
moves forward, not by some preconceived pur- 
pose, illuminating all the dark recesses of that 
something we call social progress, but rather, 
like some shuttle of fate, making no question 
of yeas or nays. In its own blindness, society 
looks back upon individuals, thinking that per- 
haps they have already determined social progress. 
But individuals have their own value as indi- 
viduals reflected down upon them from social 
values. In this dilemma society takes ready 

124 



TRUTH 125 

formed its ideal from a sphere beyond its own. 
Religion and philosophy stand ready to give 
social values a final value. The one sees value 
in terms of f eeling revealing itself in some supreme 
personality, the other sees value in some all- 
inclusive conception of truth. 

" Seek thou the true," has reverberated through 
the ages as the noblest quest of thought and 
action on this our human plane. Our minds 
have reflected this ideal in the supreme effort to 
grasp reality. They have sought for a richness 
of content quite beyond other concepts, and 
have found truth rich beyond all comparison. 
Its very richness is the cause of its illusiveness. 
We require truth to have some specific meaning, 
some content, before it can seem to us real and 
significant. Its wealth appalls our fancy. We 
demand of philosophy, in whose broad fields 
truth takes refuge, that she define for us her 
ideal in more specific terms. 

The mere word truth has no mystic spell that 
will unlock the unf athomed secrets of the universe. 
Mere truth might be called mere Wahrheit, mere 
verum. As a name it means little. Its signifi- 
cance lies in the wealth of meaning which our 
human consciousness breathes into it, the value 



126 LIFE AS REALITY 

for which truth stands. A mermaid represents 
truth of a certain kind, — the truth of mythological 
fable, — and so with every idea that the human 
mind may express, provided its significance is 
sufficiently qualified. 

Many and various have been the efforts to 
describe just what is meant by truth. Fre- 
quently a search is made among the dusty tomes 
of science and mathematics, history and law, for 
the purpose of determining, if possible, some 
characteristic common to all forms of knowledge 
that are called true. Such a description is a 
scientific attempt to reach a common understand- 
ing of what men normally mean by truth, a kind 
of average usage on all levels of knowledge. Yet 
such an attempt is at best unsatisfactory. To 
know truth there must be a standard to which 
appeal may be made in every case. There must 
be some ideal of truth relatively static and 
permanent, which may serve as a test for all 
judgments. This standard is not a matter of 
averages, nor is it to be determined by a series 
of cross references throughout all fields of 
knowledge. It must express the inner nature 
of truth and not merely the circumstances 
under which truth is ordinarily found. There 



TRUTH 127 

must be a basis of truth which is itself true 
beyond all question. 



The simplest standard of truth is correspond- 
ence. Our thoughts and actions are all more or 
less dependent upon making true judgments. 
One would walk across the room but he must 
first estimate its breadth, and must know of the 
presence or absence of any obstacles in the way. 
At the start, he must have before him a fairly 
accurate idea of all that may, in any way, be 
concerned in the practical outcome of his desire. 
The success or failure of this simple act hangs 
merely upon whether or not his preconceived idea 
was true, — whether it corresponded with facts. 
The difference between truth and error in this 
instance is the bare conformity of the idea with 
the "objects" of the room. The truth of the 
idea is open to the simplest test. Abstract truths 
of mathematics are open to this same naive test. 
The only reason why we believe in the rough 
statement "one plus one make two" is simply 
because daily observation has shown that it 
corresponds with the facts of our world. We 
believe in the attraction of all bodies and state this 



128 LIFE AS REALITY 

belief in the form of a general scientific truth, 
because the movements of all bodies, so far as our 
empirical knowledge extends, correspond to this 
general statement. Truth is the mere corre- 
spondence of idea with object, law with experience. 
This is the simplest philosophy of truth. All 
that is necessary to test any statement or supposi- 
tion is to note whether or not it corresponds with 
facts, — this and nothing more. But simplicity 
does not create a theory of truth. It may seem 
as if, in the ordinary relations to our world, we 
test truth by its correspondence to fact, — but do 
we ever find correspondence in the strict- 
est sense? It is a statement within my own 
personal observation that one plus one make 
two; its test is its agreement with facts. But 
what are facts? Ordinarily we speak of the 
world of fact as that region beyond consciousness 
which somehow fixes and tests the truth of what 
we see, — but the contrast between consciousness 
and this outer world of facts is profound. My 
idea of two is a very different matter from two 
apples or two mountains. It may even be said 
that in this world beyond consciousness there 
is nothing that is just two, it is always two 
something. We may even go so far as to assert 



TRUTH 129 

that the difference between the mental idea of 
the statement, ''one plus one make two," is as 
different from the one or the two objects out in 
the fact world as the subjective life of con- 
sciousness is different from the objective world of 
experience. All this shows that the belief in 
the correspondence between idea and object is 
based merely on the assertion within my own 
consciousness that an idea somehow agrees with 
something entirely different from itself. 

Correspondence is essentially a judgment of 
agreement. Such a judgment demands a judging 
mind. The correspondence involves, therefore, 
a mental activity which shall perceive this agree- 
ment between idea and its object. The mind is, 
thus, the arbitrator between correspondence and 
non-correspondence, between truth and error. 
But if the mind is the judge it must transform 
object into something mental in order that the 
two things judged, idea and object, shall be of the 
same denomination as itself. Otherwise judg- 
ment of correspondence would be impossible, 
as the mind could hardly deal with a mere 
"object," so utterly different from itself as to 
bear no relations to it. In the end, therefore, 
the correspondence is not between idea and 



130 LIFE AS REALITY 

object, but between two facts of consciousness. 
One of these facts we call arbitrarily " idea," 
while the other we designate as a "fact" and 
thus ascribe to it an objective existence and 
certainty of its own. Truth as correspondence 
between idea and its fact is thus in reality merely 
the equation or the balance between two elements 
of consciousness. 



The mind is responsible for the correspondence 
between ideas and objects. It determines the 
truth of that correspondence, not because truth 
is in the mind itself, but because idea and object 
meet only within consciousness. The mind, 
however, cannot estimate the correspondence of 
its own ideas with the object unless it has some 
practical " working test " at its disposal. Sense- 
ideas and sense-objects belong to utterly different 
ranges of value, hence the mind must acknowledge 
some practical test, some working formula, by 
which its ideas can be " measured up " to their 
corresponding objects. The modern pragmatist 
would supply such a "ready reckoner" of truth 
correspondence. He goes one step further in his 
desire to discover the kernel of meaning in 



TRUTH 131 

correspondence, by showing how this corre- 
pondence test of truth actually works out in our 
world of daily experience. 

Pragmatism interprets whatever truth there 
is in the agreement of an idea with its object as 
the agreement of some belief with a wide range 
of practical attitudes which depend upon it. 
Every fact involves a certain way of looking at 
the world, a certain position with regard to the 
concerns of daily life. If the fact is true, then 
this outlook on the world will present a clear, 
closely-knit and well-organized system. If it is 
false, then the whole view will be contorted. One 
plus one make two, because in all our actions 
and attitudes toward the world we act as if it 
were true, — nothing leads us to assume the con- 
trary, everything leads us to believe in its validity. 
The pragmatic formula is simplicity itself. My 
individual actions in the presence of any situa- 
tion determine the truth of what is involved 
there. Truth is a correlate of my way of acting, 
—it is a kind of by-product of my practical life. 
This, the pragmatist believes, is as near as our 
finite minds can come to truth. 

There is nothing new under the sun, except, one 
might add, a new name for an old idea. The 



132 LIFE AS REALITY 

great master of Konigsburg taught, over a hundred 
years ago, that in those ranges of human life 
where the speculative reason cannot penetrate, 
there is a power of the mind that judges of truth 
according to its significance in action, its place in 
practical life. Kant's pupils enlarged upon the 
teachings of their master until there arose a 
whole school of philosophy making an indelible 
impression on the history of thought. The 
movement had significance, not because it saw a 
narrow meaning in practical life, but because it 
interpreted our practical activity, with its moral 
impetus, in the broadest possible setting. So 
that when, finally, the greatest of Kant's disciples 
took up the pen of his teacher, practical truth 
had lost even the last trace of narrowness, and 
had become synonymous with the absolute 
truth of the universe. Modern pragmatism would 
have us forget the whole history of German 
idealism. Like the lesser Socratic schools which 
followed in the wake of Socrates and grasped 
but a single flicker from the expiring lamp of 
their master, so the modern pragmatists have 
fanned to flame a single spark from the beacon 
lighted by Kant. 
Pragmatism is, to be sure, a new name; still 



V 



TRUTH 133 

need the philosopher remodel the history of his 
subject in order that it may be made to embrace 
every outworn idea, even though it be dressed 
in the garb of the new? It was shown years ago 
by Kant and his followers that practical truth, 
the truth of the modern pragmatist, is in the end 
significant only so far as it reflects truth as a part 
of a whole system of values. It is not merely our 
own practical attitudes that make the system 
of truth, but it is the system of truth that makes 
our attitudes. 

Pragmatism has had its literary apostles. 
Novalis and Schlegel, Shelley and Byron were 
pragmatists in their philosophy of life. And 
historically, too, they owed their inspiration to the 
same vast spring of Kantian Idealism from which 
sprang modern pragmatism. But pragmatism 
in literature failed. Komanticism stands for a 
brilliant awakening of poetic genius, a noble 
reaction from the formalism of the eighteenth 
century. It touches a responsive chord in every 
heart because it demands the free expression of 
individuality, without which life is nothing. 
Yet it proved inadequate to the breadth and the 
depth of life. The freedom of the romanticist 
is the freedom of caprice. It sees universal truth 



134 LIFE AS REALITY 

in terms of a single consciousness and interprets 
this through the impulses of a single will. It 
destroys the organization of life because it gives 
us no foundation upon which to rest our apprecia- 
tion of fche world. It substitutes accident for law, 
caprice for freedom. 

It is the same with pragmatism in its theoretical 
discussion of truth. It claims to answer the 
perplexing logical quibble — "What is a true 
statement? " — by calling truth that which seems 
to be implied by one's action. I act toward the 
legend as if it were true, — therefore it is. No 
further test of its validity is possible; there is no 
standard of truth, no law of values. In the 
simplicity of his description the pragmatist has 
reached a theory of reality. He has cut the 
Gordian knot. He has put behind him, with 
one supreme stroke of the pen, the whole history 
of human speculation from Parmenides to the 
present time. Truth and reality become for him 
childishly simple. 

Yet this extreme simplicity is purchased at the 
price of a dilemma. If truth is determined 
merely by our practical attitudes, then it is 
different for each person. There is nothing 
permanent. All is ceaseless change like the flux 



TRUTH 135 

of a single consciousness. In a word, there is no 
truth, but only opinion. The pragmatist has 
murthered truth and the weird sisters have 
played him false. Yet if, on the other hand, he 
is repelled by this world of anarchy and retracts 
from his original position, admitting that there 
is a criterion of logical values beyond the indi- 
vidual consciousness, then he tacitly admits 
that truth is not confined to its practical attitudes 
but is determined by some absolute standard. 
Truth becomes world- centered and not man- 
centered; it has a value universal and not merely 
individual. On the one horn of the dilemma 
pragmatism leads us into a world without unity 
or order, plan or meaning, a mere chaos of 
opinions in which the pragmatic test is but one 
of many; on the other horn, pragmatism foregoes 
its intent and bases the practical test of truth 
on some ultimate foundation by which all lesser 
truths are tested. In either case, therefore, 
pragmatism is inadequate to the problem of 
truth. It either gives no solution at all or else 
hands truth over to some other test. 

Yet if pragmatism remained satisfied with 
its assertion of the fundamental value of will- 
activity in its account of reality we could very 



136 LIFE AS REALITY 

well let the matter rest. So far as modern 
pragmatism follows the path of Fichtean volun- 
tarism, it is on safe ground. It loses itself in 
the morass only when it would transform the 
simple immediate reality of our will-activity 
into a theory of logical truth. Its failure is a 
failure to distinguish between the vital impulses 
which we feel and those formal categories of logic 
by which the mind tries to find truth as a thought 
process. The life values given in the strivings 
of our will are sufficient without this confusion. 
They give us the self-expression which makes 
us feel the reality of life. 

Truth grows more perplexing. Already we 
saw how impossible it was to describe truth 
according to the correspondence of idea with 
object, because both require a further mediating 
test which may be applied at any time by the 
mind. The pragmatic test, as the second pos- 
sibility, proves a failure because it, too, requires 
a further test in order that truth shall be more 
than a mere chaos of opinions. Both theories, 
however, seem to have this in common — they 
demand that the world in which truth is found 
shall be in some respects a system, an order. 
The pragmatic formula is of much value as long 



TRUTH 137 

as we are allowed to assume that the truth-world 
is an organized whole in which our practical 
attitudes somehow "fit in." Admitting this, 
the pragmatist becomes an ardent supporter 
of the theory of consistency. A fact is true, not 
only because we act toward all its various rela- 
tions as if it were true, but because it occupies 
within the organized system of truth's world 
a consistent position. Truth "works" because 
it is consistent. Its "cash value" is its con- 
sistency. The statement "One and one make 
two" is true because it falls in with all our com- 
mon-sense knowledge of our fact world and is, 
further, verified in the most abstract realms of 
mathematical research. The statement is per- 
fectly consistent with everything else in the 
universe, therefore it is true — no further quibbling 
is needed. This consistency theory presents, 
therefore, a third step in the baffling hunt for 
truth order. 

This test of consistency has been a harbor of 
refuge that has saved from shipwreck many a 
voyage of discovery into the unknown sea of 
truth values. They who formerly looked upon 
truth as mere correspondence grew tired of the 
simplicity of their formula. Assailed from every 



138 LIFE AS REALITY 

side, they have fortified themselves behind the 
organic interrelatedness of all truth and called 
its practical test consistency. But we ask here, 
as we asked in the two preceding tests: What is 
the meaning of your truth-formula? Obviously 
what is consistent is merely not contradictory, 
and not-contradictory can be used as a mere 
synonym of truth. Obviously the consistency 
test must become more specific, else we dismiss 
it as a mere subterfuge of words. 

In order that we shall say, "this statement is 
consistent with all else," we must have a knowl- 
edge of this "all else." Yet no such omniscience 
is given to our poor human powers. The most 
that we can say is that it is consistent with "all 
else that has a meaning for my consciousness." 
This introduces a mental valuation into our 
description of truth, which we would wish — 
should it be possible — to shut out altogether. 
But we can't. It is always and forever the 
human mind which is judging and it is the human 
mind which applies its pet category of truth to 
its world. Consistency must be consistency for 
my world. But this "my world" is mine only 
as it has the fullness of meaning for me. What 
I don't understand, what I can't know of, isn't 



TRUTH 139 

mine in any sense whatever — hence it can't come 
into my truth formula. The world that is con- 
sistent for me is consistent because it has meaning 
for me — this and nothing more. Meaning within 
my own world-order is truth for me. In this, 
apparently, truth stands confessed. 



Truth must have meaning. It must stand for 
the expression of some specific idea in order that 
it may be consistent with other facts of the world. 
This is the teleological value of truth — the 
expression or fulfillment of some purpose. It 
gives to truth a real and significant content, 
because it makes truth stand for something to 
the human mind where alone its value is tested, 
by whatever formula we use. It makes con- 
sistency the consistency of purposes. What has 
a meaning for my consciousness has truth for me 
to just that degree, the more meaning the more 
truth, the deeper the purpose the deeper the 
truth. A friend is "true" if he fulfills the pur- 
pose, the meaning, which is involved in friend- 
ship. That one plus one make two, is a math- 
ematical truth, not because it corresponds to 



140 LIFE AS REALITY 

particular facts whatever they may be, nor be- 
cause we act as if it were true, nor even because 
it is consistent with everything else we know of 
in the universe, but because that mere statement 
is the expression of a meaning, a purpose, that 
finds its objective fulfillment wheresoever we 
turn. Consistency requires that its "fact" shall 
mean something to a conscious examiner, be that 
something little or much; so does the practical 
assurance of the pragmatist; so likewise does the 
mere correspondence of idea with object. This 
content is the last test in a world which we must 
assume to be organized, in order that truth may 
have a place of habitation. It is the meaning 
that a particular truth bears to my own con- 
sciousness and to that organized whole of which 
it is a part. Truth is consistent because it fulfills 
a purpose in the whole, it stands for a meaning 
in the totality of meanings. What is inconsistent 
simply has no meaning nor significance, and there- 
fore no truth. All is idea and the expression 
of purpose, because there alone is truth. 

The advance of this teleological conception of 
truth, as it might be called, over the previous 
views is profound. Truth is not defined as if it 
were a result of some empirical, haphazard proc- 



TRUTH 141 

ess of trial and error, in which ideas and facts 
are shuffled about until some balance is found 
and the result called truth. Nor is it denned in 
terms of some practical attitude narrowly in- 
dividualistic and unqualified by the world of 
organized facts and ideals, which it naively as- 
sumes. Nor does it call truth mere consistency 
without denning the term, a consistency which 
involves some real test to which it is deaf. Truth, 
as the fulfillment of a purpose, is universal and 
makes the whole world its own. Everything that 
is, has some measure of truth because it meets 
a purpose somehow, somewhere. That alone 
has truth in its entirety which fulfills all purposes 
— the universe as idea in its highest sense. 

Still with all the insight into the meaning of 
truth, yet this content of purpose requires an 
ulterior authority. If truth is defined by its 
purpose or its meaning then some criterion supe- 
rior even to this is required in order to determine 
whether or not a certain purpose finds its fulfill- 
ment in the concrete ideas and facts of our simple 
knowledge and daily fife. Purpose is purpose 
not merely for the mind that judges it as such but 
also for the specific value that gives it meaning. 
Purpose has significance only so far as there 



142 LIFE AS REALITY 

exists a deeper criterion of its value which, can 
be brought forward by the mind in the presence 
of any situation. Purpose goes to the heart of 
the problem of truth because it expresses meaning, 
and meaning is involved in all judgments, prac- 
tical and theoretical, individual and universal. 
But the meaning, the fulfillment of a purpose, 
which any single judgment represents, must arise 
out of the great font of reality in which truth and 
its meaning, purpose and the ultimate thing it 
signifies, meet as one. The logical quibble of 
truth becomes the metaphysical test of reality. 
It is the supreme test, not only of truth alone, 
but also of the truth of the world-order. Meaning 
must be meaning for something — and that some- 
thing must be reality. 



Truth, even as the fulfillment of a purpose, 
requires a basis of reality where the true is real, 
and the real is true. This basis is not smothered 
up in a confusion of formal dialectic. It is not 
given through another test of truth, deeper per- 
haps than purpose, but like it in character. Con- 
sistency and purpose are at most intellectual 
forms. They are the measures of truth, so long 



TRUTH 143 

as truth is an objective and external ideal. Like 
scientific categories, such as necessity and causal- 
ity, they deal with forms of thought and with 
intellectual constructions. But the reality un- 
derlying truth, as expressed in intellectual process, 
is life with its impulse and will-activity. The 
whole intellectual world of logic, where truth is 
a category of thought, is merely the outer form 
of life. Thought deals with what is external 
and formal, reflecting reality rather than being 
itself real. The underlying reality is life. In- 
tellectual process and logical form stand for it 
externally. 

Nor is this all. Each single and finite purpose 
must be in harmony with all the other single and 
finite purposes. The demand that truths shall 
be consistent with one another is no vague 
requirement. Each truth may have its inde- 
pendent orbit, but there is required besides the 
universal harmony of the spheres to hold each 
wandering truth in its place. Each single and 
finite purpose must be in accordance with a 
broader universal purpose, the meaning of which 
each only partially expresses. In this balance 
of truths with one another mere purpose must be 
purpose in terms of the whole of truth. But the 



144 LIFE AS REALITY 

only way we can know of the whole of this truth, 
the only way vouchsafed to us mortals by which 
we may test a truth, is in terms of life values. 
The unity of truths, by which alone truth can 
be consistent or fulfill a meaning to our human 
consciousness, becomes possible only when ex- 
pressed to *us as the unity of life. This is the 
only unity we know of. Every proposition in 
mathematics, every statement of science or art 
or law is true for us because it comes to our con- 
sciousness as a part of the effort to express life. 
Its purpose stands forth as the expression of a 
life value revealed in the course of our life activity. 
However stated, with whatever intricacies of 
logic or subterfuges of metaphysical deduction, 
still in the end the only meaning that can be given 
to a purpose or an idea is the meaning to life. 
There is the meeting place of all truths because 
there alone truth can come to its own. Life is 
its own supreme meaning, and purpose, and ful- 
fillment — because it is reality. 

Every description of truth leads finally to its 
description as a fife value. It is possible to speak 
of truth as correspondence because there must 
be a balance of life values. A fact corresponds 
to its idea simply because each represents a cer- 



TRUTH 145 

tain expression, the one subjective and the other 
objective, of essentially the same value. My 
idea of the Apollo Belvedere is true if it cor- 
responds, in all essential particulars, to a certain 
piece of Greek marble which people have agreed 
to designate by this name. But the testing of 
this correspondence is simply the process of com- 
paring one value of consciousness with another, 
one mental image vaguely formed with another 
derived directly from the sense impression of 
the statue. Both images, however, are for me 
definite values, each having a place in my par- 
ticular stream of consciousness and each represent- 
ing to me some aspect of life activity. Without 
this aspect of life they are nothing; they convey 
to me no meaning, no truth. 

Truth has its pragmatic value because in the 
end life is individual for me. Thus far the 
pragmatist is in an unassailable position — there 
is something in truth which is individual, simply 
because truth is, at the last analysis, life, and 
life is for me an individual revelation. But the 
pragmatist seeks to make the individuality of 
truth the excuse for its lack of organization and 
unity. He forgets that the fragmentary, partial 
character of each single truth leads unswervingly 



146 LIFE AS REALITY 

to the unity of all truth in the unity of life. 
Each truth is individual because it expresses an 
individual part in the whole, not because it is 
a law unto itself in a chaos of discord and 
caprice. 

All ranges of human value assume the ultimate 
unity of truth. No scientist can progress be- 
yond the merest rudiments of his subject without 
assuming the uniformity of nature as the nec- 
essary condition of his knowledge. This presup- 
position is impossible of proof on an empirical 
basis. Experience, as the great Scotchman long 
ago pointed out, can only give high probability, 
never the universality of law. This the scientist 
must assume, else the generality and permanent 
significance of his science crumble away. This 
presupposition of the uniformity of nature is, on 
the level of experience, the presupposition of the 
organization of knowledge in terms of an absolute 
truth. 

It is so with other values. The facts of ethics, 
of social relations, of art and of religion all assume 
the existence of an organization of knowledge 
and of truth which each fact alone only partially 
represents. This assumption of the unity of 
truths must remain a primal presupposition for 



TRUTH 147 

every subject simply because each is inadequate 
to comprehend all that is given in life. 

Truth is one. This is the lesson borne home 
by every separate sphere of human endeavor which 
seeks truth. Truth is portrayed so far as we 
seek to express life values. This is the lesson 
reached finally in the quest of truth as corre- 
spondence, as practical attitude, as consistency 
and as the fulfillment of a purpose. The oneness 
of truth and its value as life are identical. Truth 
is an organized whole, not because it is consistent 
nor because it fulfills an infinite purpose, but 
because it expresses life with all its organization, 
its internal consistency, moral strivings and activ- 
ities, its purposes and all the other things which 
give life its infinite richness. Truth too, as reality, 
is life. 



VIII 

Life as Eeality 

The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing 
moment . — Hawthorne . 

Life is personal, life is immediate, life is for 
itself ultimate. This was the lesson made clear 
by the importance of feeling in religion and 
philosophy. It is the lesson ^lso of every other 
kind of human impulse which tries to grasp 
some fleeting shadow of reality and call it all. 
We throw the material world of sense on a screen 
and read its symbols as if it were a reality alien 
to ourselves. We find, however, that the value 
of experience and science lies in the fullness with 
which they reflect the values of our own life. 
It is so also with the universal principles of 
human action with all their scope and moral 
temper. They are not ultimate themselves, but 
only stand for so much of life as can be scruti- 
nized with the ethical microscope. Under the 
continual onslaught of criticism they become more 
and more objective and impersonal until the 

148 



LIFE AS REALITY 149 

individual moral law becomes the universal 
social law. But society with all the complex 
machinery of cogs and gears has never, nor can 
it ever, reach deeper into the heart of reality 
than the single lives which move about in its 
social forms. Society is external and impersonal. 
Reality is internal and personal. 

We crave life. The old savages made universal 
life their god and worshiped its symbols. We in 
this age of mechanism turn to life with all the 
fullness of its unexplored meaning and worship 
it in our own fashion with a zeal no less intense 
than that of our savage ancestors. We welcome 
all that contributes to the expression of life; we 
throw aside all that dulls and dwarfs it. The 
expression of life, self-expression in its fullest 
sense, is for each one of us the thing above all 
else worth while. Sense experience, wealth, 
morality, and even religion each contributes its/ 
own value to the self-expression of life. Again 
we repeat — that is final. 



Self-expression is at first merely organic and 
physical. The stimulus of an athletic contest 



150 LIFE AS REALITY 

or even the satisfaction in the portrayal of some 
mechanical dexterity each has its reflex effect on 
our bodily feeling and yields, each in its own way, 
its measure of physical joy. It is these simple 
impulses of our nature that first crave self-expres- 
sion. Man has certain likes and certain dislikes. 
He seeks pleasure and avoids pain. He feels 
drawn to beauty and repelled by ugliness. He 
loves and he hates; he has organic impulses and he 
has emotions; he would follow one path, but his 
impulse for self-expression leads him into another 
— and all this with the supreme simplicity of an 
untaught child. Long before man is master of 
himself he is the slave of that much of universal 
nature as expresses itself in him. He may raise 
bulwarks aginst the eddies of his own natural 
impulses, but they are powerless in the presence 
of great natural forces. Yet it is not given us to 
question the real significance of these life im- 
pulses even on this physical level, for all self- 
expression carries with it its own content of 
reality, its own excuse for being. Nor even here 
within the sphere of natural impulse can we re- 
flect our moral colors into the activities of life. 
We cannot characterize one impulse as good 
and another as evil, one as right and another as 



LIFE AS REALITY 151 

wrong. The supreme fact remains, we act as we 
do because that much of universal life of which 
we individually partake leads us innocently by 
the hand. We cannot condemn life in part with- 
out condemning it in the whole. And were we 
able to separate the good in human life from the 
bad the magnitude of our task would soon lead 
us beyond the boundaries of our narrow per- 
ception. 

The natural impulses of our activity are the 
simplest forms of self-expression. They are, 
however, neither final in themselves nor do they 
afford more than the most meager expression of 
life. If human conduct is merely the sum of 
natural propensities and nothing more, then no 
Indian or Persian ever painted a more fatalistic 
picture of life than is given us by our own nature. 
But action as an organic activity is merely the 
groundwork. Man himself as a separate indi- 
vidual counts for something. He expresses life 
in these simple actions, but the value for which 
they stand is an immediate personal value for 
him. Exercise for the mere sake of exercise loses 
its zest the moment repetition has dulled the edge 
of novelty. The individual demands, in the self- 
expression of his life, even as pure physical 



152 LIFE AS REALITY 

activity, something that is for him self-sufficient. 
Action must have something lasting in it, some of 
its colors must be dyed in more permanent pig- 
ments than those which disappear almost before 
we act. This seeming permanence is found 
in a kind of self-satisfaction which for want of 
a better term we call pleasure. 



Since the time of the Greek, Aristippus, we 
have sought to give to pleasure its proper place in 
life. This has proved one of the most perplexing 
of questions because no one denies the immediate 
certainty of pleasure, yet its transient, fleeting 
character is apparent to all. We must find a 
place for pleasure in life, yet we hesitate to ascribe 
to it its full worth fearing lest it may vitiate the 
permanent values of life. We cannot explain 
away pleasure nor can we cast it aside on the 
supposition that it involves a moral turpitude. 
On its lower levels it may result from a mere 
gratification of hunger or thirst; on its higher 
levels it may spring from a satisfaction akin to 
that which the mathematician feels in the solution 
of a new problem or that which Gibbon felt, in 



LIFE AS REALITY 153 

his summer house in Lausanne, as he penned the 
last words of his immortal narrative. 

Pleasure may present itself as a final end in life. 
In this form it must be conceived as one among 
the many proffered answers to the problem of 
reality. Pleasure presents a theory of life. It 
would make itself final and self-sufficient. It 
points to all ranges of activity, from the simplest 
physiological response to the noblest flight of the 
constructive imagination. In all this breadth of 
human activity it asks of our own personal 
experience, Is not the thing worth while the 
pleasure, immediate or remote, which all forms 
of self-expression yield us? The logic of Hedonism 
is, from a certain point of view, unassailable. 
Experience proves that the self-expression of 
life involves pleasure. It is undeniable, there- 
fore, that it forms a part of the reality of life. 
The task of any philosophy of values is to ascribe 
to it its proper part. 

Pleasure bases its authority as a value in life 
on experience. But it is the experience of 
pleasure that proves its narrowness and insuffi- 
ciency. Pleasure in itself is single; it comes to 
consciousness as the separate tones or colors of the 
separate sense -impressions. These individual 



154 LIFE AS REALITY ' 

pleasure units disappear almost as soon as they 
arise. In order, therefore, to obtain pleasure 
in any lasting form the sense -impressions having 
a pleasurable color must be grouped together so 
that they may form a kind of pleasure continuum. 
Here lies the evasiveness of pleasure. Those sense- 
impressions which produce pleasure at one moment 
often give only pain when repeated. And if 
from past experience we would intensify the 
pleasure of well-remembered experiences by 
intensifying the experiences themselves, we find 
to our dismay that pleasure soon passes over into 
pain. A color may give pleasure in its softer 
tints and actual pain when made too intense. 
Furthermore, if a long-continued pleasure is sought 
through shifting scenes so that new sense impres- 
sions pass ceaselessly above the threshold of 
consciousness, the purpose is no better achieved. 
"Anticipations always excel realities," according 
to the old proverb, so that he that weaves a golden 
web in his imagination never finds the same 
glitter in stern experience. Pleasure presents 
us with a dilemma — if we seek it through the old 
it vanishes with repetition, if through the new 
we cannot foretell its presence. The moment we 
direct our attention toward the pleasure we are 



LIFE AS REALITY 155 

enjoying, just at that moment the pleasure 
disappears; the moment we analyze pleasure 
it dissolves away like mist before a summer's 
sun. 

Experience, then, which lures us on in the quest 
of pleasure plays us false. We are baffled in our 
search, we are defeated in our purpose. A life- 
plan cannot be woven out of this confusion of 
sensations and emotions. A school of the ancient 
Greeks, pleased with the simplicity of the pleasure 
motive in life, grasped at the fleeting chimera 
and called it all. But it ended in pessimism. 
Hegesias, the last of the Cyrenaics, despairing 
of ever finding a life of pleasure, called life bad, 
utterly bad. So it is with us, we seek pleasure 
as the expression of our life purpose, but it eludes 
our grasp. Mere pleasure passes away; if pur- 
sued for a long while the futility of the quest 
leads to a morbidness akin to the pessimism of 
the old Greek. 

Pessimism, like some showy saphrophyte, feeds 
on dead hopes and thwarted ambitions; it is the 
decay and not the fruition of life. As presented 
to us in literature and human experience it is an 
attitude of mind, not a philosophy of life. Men 
and nations embittered by failure are pessimists, 



156 LIFE AS REALITY 

not because they have discovered any final solu- 
tion to life, but because they have failed to find 
its real self-expression. Men who have made the 
transient pleasures of experience their dominating 
pursuit to the extinction of all else come at last 
to realize the futility of their effort and call life 
evil. 

Pessimism always rests on a preconceived belief 
that the final value of life consists in some experi- 
ence of pleasure. It has burst forth as the last 
cry of despair when experience has failed to 
justify the belief in "those things men set their 
hearts upon." Pessimism springs from human 
failure, and human failure arises from the shat- 
tered confidence and the forlorn hope of the human 
spirit in the presence of impossible tasks. The 
man who has spent his life in the pursuit of 
wealth finds as the declining years dull his senses 
and narrow his vision that he has spent his life 
in the quest of an unattainable end. Like the Jew 
of Malta he sacrificed his life on the altar of a 
false god. The scholar struggling with his self- 
appointed tasks sees in the accumulation of 
knowledge a life purpose, but in its pursuit he 
finds the horizon ever widening, until at last he 
recognizes that the task he has essayed is endless. 



LIFE AS REALITY 157 

Looking back, therefore, on the sacrifices he has 
made at an altar consecrated with his own hands, 
he too calls life a hopeless tragedy. Like Dr. 
Faustus, he has sold his soul for knowledge, and 
the devil has played him false. 

But pessimism is more than an attitude of 
mind regarding the outcome of life; it is, strictly 
speaking, a theory of the nature of reality. It 
is more than an interpretation of individual 
experience, for to refute it on this narrow ground 
is to assume a position more or less in sympathy 
with it. It is then simply an issue depending on 
the predominance between the good in life and the 
evil. But who shall judge this for even a single 
life? Self-satisfaction cannot be measured nor 
can the good and the evil in life be compared and 
balanced. Pessimism is essentially a theory of 
reality, not a mere attitude of life to be proved 
or disproved by the casual experience of each 
wandering soul. In its broadest sense it repre- 
sents an attempt to give moral color to the world 
of reality. It asserts that the part of existence 
which is apportioned to man in this life of ours, 
is evil and not good. Life is a tragedy, not so 
much in detail nor even in cast, but in setting and 
in plot. 



158 LIFE AS REALITY 

As a theory of the real nature of life the arith- 
metical juggling of pleasure and pain adds not 
one straw to the strength of pessimism, nor tends 
in the least to refute it. Pessimism hangs on the 
belief that the human mind can reflect the moral 
colors of its own good and evil purposes into a 
world of reality. Whether we can call this life 
of ours good or bad depends in the end upon our 
ability to read into the reality of life the good and 
the evil which we ourselves create. Reality is 
not an attitude of mind. Life is too complex, too 
subtile, to permit of confidence in the moral dis- 
tinctions which we are wont to make. Out of our 
own human conceit we have created certain 
standards by which to judge the world, as if we 
had been ordained to sit in judgment over the 
purpose of life and the moral order of the universe. 
This applies to the optimist no less than to the 
pessimist. The optimist looks out on the world 
from his narrow cell and calls it good — ' ' the best 
of all possible worlds." The pessimist, because of 
temperament or limited experience, wails the 
evil of all things. To call the world bad the 
pessimist must know of a better one; to call it 
good the optimist must know of a worse one. 

Life, as an aspect of reality, as a living fact 



LIFE AS REALITY 159 

apart from our objective judgment of it, has no 
moral coloring. It is neither good nor bad, moral 
nor immoral. Each life expresses in its own finite 
way, a certain aspect, a certain shade, in the 
expression of reality. The world- order would 
be incomplete, it would not be the all, were a 
single fact of life not what it is. Beyond this 
we cannot go. Our own human purposes may 
objectify life and pass judgment on its pictures 
as they are thrown on a screen — hence it becomes 
good or bad according to the lights with which 
the screen is illumined. But reality, immediately 
lived in the self-expression of life, is devoid of 
moral color simply because it lies deeper than our 
moral judgment. Eeality cannot be pictured nor 
can it be weighed in the balance of our finite 
purposes. 



Pleasure cannot be made the final end in life 
because pleasure alone defeats its end. It is at 
best an accompaniment of self-expression and as 
such adds its particular contribution to the 
reality of life. Pursued to the flood for its own 
sake it ebbs back as pessimism. Our own experi- 
ence teaches this, if the wisdom of ages is 



160 LIFE AS REALITY 

not sufficient. Yet aside from pleasure we 
demand self-expression in some form as our 
personal mode of expressing reality. We demand 
at least a final purpose toward which we may 
strive, a "cause" or ambition which may enlist 
our efforts. We believe this will afford a field 
for our primitive self-expression and we doubt 
not that in this activity *we shall derive pleasure 
as a secondary result. We choose our motive as 
a fundamental interest in life. Objectively it 
may be the pursuit of wealth, or political power, 
or the honors of scholarship, but subjectively we 
value it according to the depth and intensity of 
self-expression it affords. We even beguile our- 
selves into believing that this "cause" or objective 
end is the thing sought for and not the immediate 
self-satisfaction that ensnares us. In all this 
the thing of value is the expression of life. 

We crave wealth for the opportunity it gives 
to portray our own purposes in men and things. 
It is to narrow minds the easiest and most direct 
road to power, because wealth values are measured 
by external standards. The modern "captain 
of industry" cares but little about the actual 
wealth he acquires, — six figures are quite as 
significant to him as seven. The real thing he 



LIFE AS REALITY 161 

wants and craves and by which he measures his 
achievements is his power. Wealth is only 
means to an end; power is both means and end. 
On this altar he lays his all, pride, honor and ideals. 
He prostitutes his name and his family to this 
end and counts the cost as cheap. In all this 
struggle it is self-assertion which spurs him on. 
It is a game in which the counters are pure gold 
and the self-expression of life the stake. 

Another type of mind finds that political 
power affords the most immediate form of self- 
expression. Few men who clamor for political 
recognition care in the least about the welfare 
of those who raise them to position. All the 
glamour and the glitter of patriotism, of freedom, 
of national prosperity and the rights of all are 
flaunted in the face of a long-suffering people in 
the hopes that some of these vague ideals may 
excite tangible visions in their minds. It is 
the struggle of a few for the expression of power 
through the many. The few call this expression 
honor; they crave it because it is their inter- 
pretation of life. 

This is true also when political power is identi- 
fied with some patriotic "cause." The primitive 
pleasure of self-expression, though perhaps subtly 



162 LIFE AS REALITY 

veiled to the patriot himself, is nevertheless the 
motive that brings about his real satisfaction. 
Some noble-minded man seeks to raise himself 
to power in order to create a lasting public 
utility or help to bring about some humanitarian 
end. He feels the moral force of his mission. 
He labors heart and soul for the ''cause," not 
thinking for a moment of his own advancement. 
His motives and the ends he seeks are of the 
noblest kind. He is unselfish in the largest sense. 
Still with all this the intensity of his utterances 
and the vigor of his actions arise not from the 
mere belief in the "cause," but rather from the 
reflection of himself within the "cause." He 
sees himself as a part of a great movement that 
surges about him. He cannot remain quiet, for 
it is he within the "cause" that clamors for self- 
expression. He finds his own life purpose in 
this movement, which he temporarily regards as 
something outside of himself. Its success or 
failure becomes his own success or failure. Here 
he finds a satisfaction that is purely personal 
because the "cause" to him is purely personal. 
Solon and Themistocles, Washington and Lincoln 
acted, if history tells us aright, from the highest 
motives of a noble patriotism. Yet beneath it all 



LIFE AS REALITY 163 

the reward which came to each was a satisfaction 
immediate and personal. In the whole-souled 
devotion to a humanitarian end the patriot finds, 
like the seeker for pleasure or wealth or power, 
the sphere for his own primitive self-expression. 
This is for him the meaning of life. 

Learning and a life of scholarship are supposed 
to offer a type of satisfaction which carries the 
mind far above the fleeting pleasures of sense. 
The modern utilitarian, still fond of his "greatest 
happiness principle" but cringing under the 
implications of sensualism, takes refuge in the 
distinction between the higher and the lower 
pleasures, the mental and the physical. The 
moralist and the romancer, each seeking in a 
separate way to understand the values of life, 
have laid stress upon the balance between the 
sense and the intellect. They have required 
that we note the more permanent satisfaction 
that arises from intellectual enjoyment. Here 
then on what has seemed to men in all ages as the 
highest level of human activity the intellectual 
life ought to justify itself as an ideal not vitiated 
by purely self-determined motives. 

This, however, proves not the case. The 
pursuit of learning is of the same intent as the 



164 LIFE AS REALITY 

pursuit of wealth or power. On the surface it 
seems to have lifted itself above the gross of a 
pleasure-seeking world. Yet in the end the 
impulse that leads the scholar to push forward 
the frontier points of knowledge in some single 
direction or the pedant to acquire his chips of 
learning is the same impulse for individual self- 
expression. At the last analysis it is purely 
personal, purely selfish. The writer of a mono- 
graph, be it on Gasteropods or Ahura Mazda, may 
say in his preface that this bit of research, meager 
though it is, may perhaps add something to that 
stock of facts which is briefly called human 
knowledge. Yet this motive is childishly super- 
ficial; the real impulse lies far deeper. He enjoys 
his microtomic sections and his dusty tomes. 
He feels a vital satisfaction in the pursuit of 
facts, in the construction of hypotheses and the 
testing of law. He enjoys the competition with 
other scholars and counts success by the measur- 
able achievements of publications and position. 
It is a game, like the pursuit of wealth, only here 
the counters are not chips of gold, but crumbs of 
knowledge. The story is told of an American 
student in a German University who had nearly 
finished a doctorial thesis when he was confronted 



LIFE AS REALITY 165 

with, the published work of a fellow scholar on the 
identical subject. Crazed with disappointment he 
attempted to cut his throat. Fortunately for our 
knowledge of the classics he recovered, and may 
even now be dispensing Greek roots to admiring 
classes. 

The painter, the novelist, the critic and the 
poet all find in the practice of their arts a field 
for the self-expression of their individual lives. 
This is all — unless it be the ulterior motives of 
wealth and influence. We enjoy the satisfaction 
which the embodiment of our ideas involves. 
We delude ourselves into thinking that this 
enjoyment is objective in the thing itself, while 
in reality we gloat in the subjective activity 
which finds in the sphere of the intellect an- 
other medium for its primitive self-expression. 
The scholar or the artist tlirows his personality 
into the task before him. He makes it one with 
his own life. It therefore becomes real to him 
and to the world. This is the value of the intel- 
lect in terms of life. It is reality expressing itself. 



All forms of self-expression, whether mere 
pleasure, mere wealth, mere power, or mere 



166 LIFE AS REALITY 

learning, pursued for the gratification of their 
ends alone, lead to a hopeless series of thwarted 
efforts. This is life from the outside, but it is 
not the vital germ. Life viewed externally 
presents an infinite series of possibilities, and we 
learn from experience that the goal we select 
is never realized. All life-purposes viewed ex- 
ternally lead alike through failure to pessimism. 
Yet in the self-expression which each act, each 
hope, and each achievement gives, there is the 
immediate reward of portraying some particular 
phase of one's own individuality. In this there 
is something final. Self-expression is not of 
value for what it accomplishes, for this can never 
be more than a term in a series, a step in an 
infinite process. Its value lies in what it stands 
for itself, the individuality which is just itself 
and nothing else. It is, therefore, immediate 
and not relative; an end in itself and not a means. 
Self-expression, as life, gives us the germ of 
reality that the seekers for pleasure, for power 
and for learning blindly strive for. The things 
they struggle after have significance to them and 
to the whole universe merely as parts of a single 
life's individuality. The struggles, hopes and 
thwarted purposes are the outer casements. The 



LIFE AS REALITY 167 

real life-value is the individuality which is realized 
through the immediate self-expression. It is 
the primitive satisfaction of expressing itself in 
its own way. This is art in its most universal 
embodiment, the art of life. 

Every act of life has the deepest significance, 
every life as a whole has the deepest value, not 
because of moral color, but because of its por- 
trayal of reality. We cannot judge of the mean- 
ing of another's life, because reality can never 
be thrown on a screen; it can never be objectified 
and made impersonal. We can never know the 
impulses to action of another's life — in a certain 
sense we cannot know our own, we can only feel 
them. Life expresses its own unique individuality. 
This is not the outward form, the success or the 
failure, but it is what life as a living reality yields 
to the single person. This is the subtle difference 
between appearance as object and reality as life. 
The one can be made universal, the other is its 
own individuality and nothing else. The facts 
of experience, the values of wealth, the universal 
moral law — these may be made general. They 
may be weighed in the balance of men's minds 
and tested at some final court of appeal. Not so 
with reality as life. That is irreducible. That is 



168 LIFE AS REALITY 

single. Its value and its significance is just that 
something which it expresses as it passes. We 
realize this something in the degree with which 
we fill each momentary effort with the fullest self- 
expression that lies within our power. It is 
revealed as the life-impulse with which each 
instant is saturated with will- effort. Live to the 
fullest in every moment and we get reality. 

This self-expression is for life something final. 
It is ultimate within a world of its own. Life 
feels its own deep reality and beneath this feeling 
no philosophy nor metaphysics can ever pene- 
trate. It is the immediate reality of life so far 
as it is revealed with any distinctness. I feel 
that I am real; this feeling demands self-expres- 
sion. In these two assertions all the inner reality 
of consciousness stands naked and confessed. 
The multitude of facts and experiences which are 
forever passing above the threshold of conscious- 
ness have merely a reflected value. All the in- 
tellectual processes of logic and thought, all the 
ethical and metaphysical constructions which 
confine themselves to expressing reality as a 
closed system of relations, deal forever with 
externals. Their reality is borrowed. They are 
the pictures of the real showing us various phases 



LIFE AS REALITY 169 

of its external form, much as the outworn integu- 
ments of insects give us the shape but not the 
substance of the living animal. But life is itself 
the germ of what experience, science, the moral 
principles and the religious beliefs are the sense 
forms. In the deep recesses of the human con- 
sciousness there is the impulse for self-expression 
which cannot be crystallized into an intellectual 
process nor thrown on the screen of sense expe- 
rience as an objective fact; it is an impulse which 
cannot be suppressed nor laid aside. It clamors 
for the assertion of its own reality. This is for 
us final. 



IX 

THE ONE IN MANY 

In dem gegenwartigen Idealismus hat die Thatigkeit 
uberhaupt ihr Gesetz unmittelbar in sich selbst. — Fichte. 

Within the sphere of life there is a final 
reality. It is the immediate fact of life felt, 
not known. Beneath this we cannot penetrate. 
Truth, whether the truth of correspondence or of 
practical values, whether the truth of consistency 
or the truth of purpose, must, in the end, be 
truth just because it has value for life. Truth 
is truth because in the final test of value which 
life alone determines it is found to have a place. 
Truth has value for life — this is the deepest 
significance it can have. 

But this is not enough. The immediacy of life 
is an individual fact underlying all values from 
sense experience to religion. But as a single 
fact of my individual belief it has significance 
for me alone. Life is broader than this individual 
feeling that seems to arise as a by-product of 

170 



THE ONE IN MANY 171 

my own consciousness. Life is universal in the 
sense of being the ultimate reality, in the sense of 
being the final value for all our human, finite 
values. Yet in universalizing life we cannot 
make it synonymous with a Divine Personality, 
because the being of God is always objective to 
his world, whereas life is the world — "in whom 
we five and move and have our being." Life 
itself is its Absolute. 

The history of human speculation has dealt 
from time to time with various generalized 
abstractions, all of which have come in and out 
of fashion with a kind of mathematical regularity. 
But beneath these there lies the human passion 
for unity. The mystics and the idealists, the 
materialists and the scientists have ever been 
fascinated with the craze for uniformity. They 
have pursued every fragment of our human 
experience in the search for some consistent 
clue to unity; they have explored the facts of 
the human mind, the motives of our ethical 
world and the cravings of our religious con- 
sciousness in the hope that fields of the most 
diverse character will bear testimony to the unity 
of the world. Nor has all this been in vain. The 
human mind believes in its unity; the phraseology 



172 LIFE AS REALITY 

of all its languages has grown up about this 
central conception. Yet we demand of the monist 
that he shall describe his Absolute with greater 
precision. We want our yearning for unity 
satisfied by a more definite, more intelligible, 
more natural description than is usually vouch- 
safed in metaphysical abstractions. We want 
to know our unity. 



For its own purposes science has always assumed 
a lifeless world beyond our sense perception. In 
order to show the contrast between the inner 
world of consciousness and the outer world of 
nature, between life and what seems to be with- 
out life, science has taken away from matter 
itself any semblance to fife. For the purposes 
of pure description it has seemed necessary to 
refer to material facts as if they were mere 
objects. Freedom of independent action, a con- 
sciousness or even an independent fife of their 
own would frustrate the chief object of science 
in reducing everything to law. Science insists, 
therefore, often with a dogmatic arrogance 
unbecoming to its dignity, that its phenomena 
shall have no independent value of their own. 



THE ONE IN MANY 173 

Its facts must be concerned with mere objects 
and nothing else. 

This sharp line of distinction between the living 
and the dead is the theoretical standpoint of 
science, but it is not adhered to as rigidly now as 
it has been in years gone by. The unbridgable 
chasm between man and the lower animals, the 
invariant differences between the biological and 
the physical worlds, mean much less to-day than 
they did a century ago. Science grows less 
insistent on the fundamental differences among 
its objects. Vitalism is no longer an eternal 
truth to the chemist who has learned to duplicate 
many of the activities of living protoplasm. 
Indeed, so important have the physiological 
processes of organisms become from the point of 
view of their chemistry that a new science has 
risen to immense importance entirely within 
the lifetime of men now living. Chemistry sees its 
own universal laws reflected throughout the whole 
of nature, from the formation of a molecule of 
water to the metabolism of the neuron. 

The biological sciences, working downward 
from man to dead nature, see the universality 
of life on all levels. Science would construct 
a unity of life. The theory of organic evolution 



174 LIFE AS REALITY 

begins to reason from the known of human life 
through the unknown of the geologic past to the 
first beginnings of life as we now understand it. 
But at last it comes to a chasm to which it is 
blind, the chasm between living and dead matter. 
If it opens its eyes to this it must see that its 
vast hypothesis with all the intricacies of con- 
struction and explanation is groundless sophistry 
unless that part of nature which it calls dead can 
be endowed with some form of life. Evolution 
can work backward to the Amoeba and the Pro- 
tococcus; to go further it must embrace the uni- 
verse. 

Psychology, from the point of view of con- 
sciousness, is moving in the same general direction. 
It finds, it is true, the psychic life of the lower 
animals different from that of man, but is it a 
difference of kind or of degree? We are able to 
attribute consciousness to other persons solely 
because their actions resemble what we believe 
ours would be in similar situations. Employing 
the same reasoning from analogy we may infer — 
and we have no reason to infer otherwise — that 
the various responses of the lower animals to the 
changes in the world about them arise from a 
consciousness similar to our own but differing in 



THE ONE IN MANY 175 

form and intensity. If we refuse to admit this 
premise we must arbitrarily assume that there 
is somewhere in the animal kingdom a sharp line 
between the life that is conscious and the life 
that is not. But what shall determine this line? 
Consciousness is known only through the analogy 
between our own actions and those of another 
creature, yet even the primitive Amoeba responds 
to touch stimuli and different wave-lengths of light. 
It is far easier to infer the universality of con- 
sciousness in some form than be driven into the 
necessity of denning the conditions under which 
it is present and those under which it is absent. 
Driven to the terms of its definitions psychology 
must admit the universality of consciousness, 
otherwise it cannot be sure of its presence on the 
highest level of life. 

Life itself is indefinable to science because it 
cannot be thrown on a screen and described in 
exact terms. Those external phenomena of liv- 
ing matter which can come within the range of 
scientific description are always such facts as 
can be made the direct objects of our empirical 
knowledge. Science infers the existence of fife 
from these external phenomena. The minute 
Amoeba moves, it grows, it divides and subdivides. 



176 LIFE AS REALITY 

These activities lead biology to declare that the 
Amoeba has life, since on higher ranges these 
characteristics are invariably associated with 
those beings it has learned to call alive. It is 
merely a question of analogy between the higher 
and the lower. The crystal is not considered 
alive, because it does not show all the character- 
istics found connected with life as science defines 
it. The crystal cannot move of itself nor re- 
produce its kind, therefore science calls it dead 
matter. But what right have we to set up a 
criterion to distinguish the living from the lifeless, 
since by the very nature of scientific knowledge 
we can never know, in terms of an abstract 
definition of science, what life really is? In de- 
claring that the crystal is without fife, that it is 
in no sense allied to the organisms we call alive, 
science presumes for itself an insight into the 
inner nature of living processes. This is a pre- 
sumption without foundation, since scientific 
knowledge concerns itself only with life in its 
external manifestations, and we have no basis 
for asserting that all fife manifests itself in the 
general ways we choose to recognize. 

There is, therefore, nothing in science that con- 
tradicts the universality of life. On the contrary 



THE ONE IN MANY 177 

it is accumulating evidence, from year to year, 
that tends to tear down the barriers between the 
living and the dead. It sees, more and more, 
the lower reflected in the higher and the higher 
in the lower. Every field of science teaches the 
unity of nature, not only in rough outline, but in 
detail. Scientific knowledge cannot give life 
to one part of this unity without giving it to the 
whole. Beyond this we cannot go. Science can 
strike no deeper into the problem of reality be- 
cause it deals forever with externals. Science 
can only make the universality of fife probable, 
it can never make it certain because its objective 
descriptions cannot know life as reality. 



Science cannot reach reality because it remains 
forever objective. Art, however, would attain the 
goal in one supreme flash of intuition. It would 
grasp life in a single bound. Art approaches its 
ideal when it is able to breathe into its creations 
the breath of life; it fails when they seem dead. 
Look out on the marble fretwork and gilded 
mosaics of St. Mark's. The impression is not one 
of great beauty. With all its domes and columns, 



178 LIFE AS REALITY 

its overwrought sculptures and ornate galleries, 
it bespeaks a monument of human ingenuity, 
but it is without life. Its statues do not speak 
of a greatness lost to Venice forever. Its four 
bronze horses are still prancing in action as in the 
days of Bellini, but their life is out of harmony 
with the huge basilica. 

The greatness of Greek art was its portrayal 
of life. Turn from the flamboyant pile of St. 
Mark's to the simple beauty of the statue of 
Hermes that Praxiteles is said to have cut. It 
looks down from its pedestal in the little museum 
of Olympia with a more than human conscious- 
ness. It seems to read the thoughts of those 
who sit opposite to it with the calm disdain of 
one who has run the whole gamut of human 
experience. The three female figures, taken by 
Lord Elgin from the pediment of the Parthenon, 
— called without good reason "the three fates," 
— suggest to us what was so supremely fine in 
Greek art. The three figures have come down 
to us without heads or arms, yet the art they 
portray is probably as near perfection as human 
genius is likely to create. They combine the 
Greek simplicity, the Attic poise of mind, with 
the perfection of technique which was alike com- 



THE ONE IN MANY 179 

mon to the Attic and the Argive schools. Yet 
with all this, the greatness of their art lies not 
in the Greek poise of mind nor in the skill of their 
sculptural technique. It is in the vision of life 
these three mutilated figures portray. Phidias 
— or one of his pupils — has made articulate so 
much of the living as could be hardened into stone; 
he has made us feel a vital spark through the long 
intervening centuries and appreciate something 
of what life meant to the Greek genius. Even 
Greek architecture, where life is most difficult 
to express, has about it a living germ. Those 
who have seen the view from the Acropolis, 
especially at dusk, may have caught a glimmer 
of what the Greek art in its supreme effort to 
portray life must have meant to the Greek him- 
self. In the foreground, in its beautiful sim- 
plicity, stands the little temple of Nike; below 
are the purple waters of Salamis with iEgina 
in the distance, while a deep golden glow burns 
along the low hills that skirt Athens. Even the 
columns of the Parthenon that he prostrate on 
the ground speak with a life of their own. They 
call from another world: "Phidias has given us 
a reality which no Turk nor Venetian nor even 
time can wholly kill." It seems the abode of 



180 LIFE AS REALITY 

some living spirit. It was alive to the Greek 
and that is why he has made immortal in Pen- 
tellic marble that something of life which he 
understood so well. 

But the aesthetic experience is not in itself 
absolute. It derives its value from its cross- 
references to life, from its ability to give us a 
copy of some phase of the multiform variety of 
life which shall be universal to the sense-experi- 
ence of all of us. In itself, from its psychological 
significance, beauty is deadening to life. It 
gives us at best an artificial copy which we mistake 
for the reality. Life is activity, it is not con- 
templation. The soul that loses itself in aesthetic 
enjoyment surrenders its own individual share 
of reality. For the time being it becomes one 
with its aesthetic object; it sees reality as an 
object of sense perception, forgetting that the 
only reality that- has permanent value surges 
up from the individual soul as activity. Action 
cares little for the beauty of external sense- 
experience. It makes its own reality; it does not 
find it revealed in something else. The fine arts 
lead to passivity, to inaction, to quiescence, to 
rest. No wonder Plato excluded them, especially 
music, from his ideal state, knowing full well 



THE ONE IN MANY 181 

their deadening influence. Their share of reality 
lies in an artificial portrayal of life, but the 
deepest reality we ourselves can express lies not 
in seeing life without, but in feeling it in action. 
Religion, like science and art, seeks life as its 
ideal. The earliest and most primitive religions 
we know of are simple prayers to the spirit of 
nature. The savage must interpret all nature 
after the pattern of his own consciousness. And 
we, notwithstanding our claims of enlighten- 
ment, must do likewise. The religious conscious- 
ness seeks to represent the world as the embodi- 
ment of some active, vital principle, the presence 
of which the human spirit vaguely feels. This 
is why religions have always been idealistic and 
not materialistic, why they have always moved 
from a pluralism of forces to a monism of mind. 
Christianity was successful in its struggle with 
Roman paganism simply because in the ideal of 
Christ there was more vitality and human appeal 
than the Latin priests could infuse into the dead 

god s of Etruria, 

/^Philosophy, above all else, stands for life as 

\touth^-^With all the conflict of thought since the 

age of the Hindoos and the Greeks the current 

of progress has not swerved in its direction. 



182 LIFE AS REALITY 

Anaxagoras and Plato planted the seeds of the vine 
from which Kant and Hegel picked the ripened 
fruit. Even the parallel influences of materialism 
and pluralism have softened under the mellowing 
influence of time. No longer do we hear that the 
brain secretes thought as the liver bile. The 
empirical psychologist, once so certain of his 
understanding of the mind, is willing now to 
admit that his scientific description of the states 
of consciousness cannot reach the meaning of 
consciousness itself. No longer can materialism 
fall back on psychology in its denial of the ultimate 
reality of fife. Neurons and sensations have 
ceased to explain the whole field of consciousness. 
In a sense philosophy is no better able to grasp 
the reality of life than empirical psychology or 
art or religion. Yet during all the years of its 
long history, for it is as ancient as the myths of 
the race, it has not won for men in vain the great 
lesson of the lordship of mind over matter and the 
reality of life. This cannot be lost, whatsoever 
the philosophical problems of the future. 

That science, art, religion and philosophy 
should all point in the same direction toward the 
final reality of life is no mere accident of circum- 
stance. Each of these great efforts of human 



THE ONE IN MANY 183 

consciousness is concerned with essentially the 
same problem. Like a rich Oriental agate, 
whose colors vary with every change in the direc- 
tion of light, life appears different according to the 
angle from which it is viewed. As science it 
reveals itself as law and order in a material world. 
It portrays itself in a sense-world seemingly 
objective and dead; yet when science attempts 
to go deeper than what is immediately given it 
must stop at the portal or else see in experience 
the revelation of life. In the end life alone has 
for science a final reality. Art, too, would make 
life real to the senses. It would endow the mate- 
rial world with something of the secret which it 
feels in the pulse of all nature. Eeligion, taking 
the feeling of the immediate certainty of life, 
from which all knowledge and reality starts, 
would extend this upward and outward until 
at last it has embraced the ideal of a Divine 
Personality; and lastly philosophy, seeing in all 
things their value, sees too that the revelation 
of reality which each life bears, and by which 
all values in the universe are reflected, has itself 
a meaning only in life as the Absolute. 



1S4 LIFE AS REALITY 

Among the violent struggles in the history of 
speculative thought none stand out clearer than 
that between the advocates of an intellectual view 
of the world and those who would interpret it in 
terms of some emotional intuition. Is the Abso- 
lute a concept of the intellect or a supreme state of 
feeling? Is it a sharply defined construction of the 
mind or is it attained in mystic comtemplation 
or poetic ectasy? In the presence of this question 
philosophy has always come back to immediate 
experience for the solution, as it must for an answer 
to all its permanently significant questions. On 
the one hand we find that every activity of con- 
sciousness is in a certain sense an intellectual 
activity, since mere conscious knowledge involves 
the perception of relations between states of 
mind. This is a simple matter of psychology. 
It is an equally simple matter of psychology to 
suggest as well, that the very immediacy, the 
direct certainty of all states of mind cannot be 
reached by any intellectual perception of rela- 
tions, but must arise as an immediate revelation 
of feeling. The presence of the experience comes 
through feeling, its significance through some 
subsequent intellectual process. These are the 
simple facts of our mental machinery that are 



THE ONE IN MANY 185 

accessible to metaphysics. But they are enough. 
Philosophy cannot be blind to the daily lesson 
of experience. It must see that the intellectual 
and the emotional contents of our world of con- 
sciousness have both their importance in any 
understanding of the world- order. 

Life as reality unites these primary types of 
metaphysical synthesis. Intellectualism is limited 
in its scope. Theoretically it is limited to what 
can be externally pictured before consciousness; 
practically it is limited to the state of our human 
knowledge and the capacity of the intellect. It 
may move from cause to effect, from one relation 
to another, but the ground of its progress will 
always he in definite, finite sense qualities and 
mental images. For this reason its approach to 
the reality of life must follow necessarily the 
beaten track along which it pulls its ponderous 
chain of causal sequences. The result is an 
Absolute of pure relativity; a mind which is 
supreme in a sphere of pure logic. Such a 
description of reality is indefinitely — one hesitates 
to say infinitely — rich in the fullness of all that 
it contains. But it remains to the end a logical 
construction, wonderful in its portrayal of the 
powers of the intellect but formal and in the 



186 LIFE AS REALITY 

deepest sense unreal. The intellect has played 
a game in logic's universe of discourse and the 
Absolute is the laurel wreath. 

Even more striking is the failure when the 
reins of Pegasus pass from the intellect to the 
feeling. Feeling is immediate; the Absolute is 
universal. No single flight of intuitive feeling 
can of itself carry us beyond the singleness of 
the present moment. Feeling has all the indi- 
viduality, the singleness of a mere point. Admit 
for a moment differences and plurality into feeling 
and it assumes the form of an intellectual process. 
It is no longer pure feeling, but a complex inter- 
play between feeling and our ordinary thought 
processes. So when the mystic tells us that he 
has reached the divine essence of the world, that 
he has thrown aside all the binding chains of 
thought and sense, spanning the gulf between the 
finite and the infinite by one supreme intuition, he 
tells us merely that he has objectified his own 
feeling of reality. He has reached unity, but he 
has lost all that the unity unites. His Absolute 
of pure intuition is as narrowly unreal as the 
conceptual construction of the intellectualist. 

The world is not as simple as the intellectual- 
ist or the emotionalist would make it. The 



THE ONE IN MANY 187 

Absolute is neither inexhaustible relativity nor 
immediate intuition. Life is neither one uncolored 
immediacy, nor is it the play of the intellect 
among the shadows of its own creation. Life 
is both one and many, both immediate and 
relative. It includes feeling because it is through 
feeling that it grasps its own reality; it includes 
the intellect because it is through intellectual 
processes that it breaks away from the immediacy 
of a single moment in time. Feeling gives life 
its sphere; the intellect enables it to realize the 
inexhaustible richness of its world. Feeling gives 
us life as one reality; the intellect enables us to 
break down the hallowed circle of one single 
life's solitary existence and see the many in one. 

The Absolute of life is more than the practical activities 
with which the pragmatist wishes to construct his world. 
There must be a centralizing focus to hold each in its place ; 
there must be an Absolute attitude to give each finite attitude 
its meaning. Nor, going one step further, can the Absolute 
be merely the fulfillment of an idea, eternally reflecting its 
own meaning. The idea of the Absolute must express 
something for which idea as idea stands. The subject of 
the idea must be itself an idea, — the something for which 
idea stands must be yet another idea. This mystic circle 
of idea and its subject cannot be broken through by making 
idea an infinite self-repeating system because the system 
is either an arbitrary construction, — in which case it is of 
course unreal, — or else it must be brought into connection. 



188 LIFE AS REALITY 

through some deeper value, with what we actually express 
in life. This deeper value is either another arbitrary con- 
struction, — in which no progress is gained, — or else it must 
be life itself, which is alone able to give value to all our 
constructive interpretations of reality. Life, then, as 
Absolute, is alone able to give unquestionable reality to all 
the purposes, finite and self-reflecting, of which the human 
mind can conceive. 



The inability of philosophy to grasp the full 
meaning of life is the inability of any human 
effort to reach its ideal. An understanding of 
life involves an understanding of the Absolute, 
with the fullness of absolute knowledge. Yet as 
ideal for our finite understanding of reality the 
Absolute of life is nearer to our consciousness 
than any other of the great ideals of thought. 
We understand the present dimly, but in that 
present we see the future and the past revealed. 
We understand life only so far as it is present 
reality for us, but in that present reality we have 
the only means within our power of understand- 
ing all reality. We cannot be skeptics because 
the present is not the all, nor can we deny to the 
whole of reality an actual existence because this 
wholeness is never revealed to us in one intuition. 
The present reality of life is immediate, it stands 



THE ONE IN MANY 189 

naked and unmasked, but its very depth shows 
that it is only a part of a whole. Yet the only 
way we can know the merest trifle of the whole 
is through that part. It stands for its own 
individual reality, and it stands also for the 
reality of the whole. This philosophy seeks to 
grasp in the pursuit of its ideal. This ideal is 
the fullness of life. 



X 

The Many in One 

8txX' spew* xoxh [ikv Y<xp ev tqu^tjOtq 

Ijlovov elvai 
£x xXeovwv, tots 8' aii §i€<pu 

xXeov' e£ evbg elvat 

Empedocles 

The world that we know is the world of our 
daily life and experience. No theoretical solu- 
tion to the problem of reality will quite suffice 
unless it can be fully tested by our simple con- 
sciousness. We grow skeptical of any theoretical 
structure which cannot be brought down to our 
ordinary everyday understanding. This is natural 
and healthy. We believe first in the facts of our 
own consciousness and in our own life; our desire 
for a world- order comes later. 

Metaphysics has constructed many theories of 
reality during its centuries of activity. It has 
taken the fragments of our experience and built 
up various pictures all hopelessly at variance with 

190 



THE MANY IN ONE 191 

the consciousness in which we live and move. 
A magnificent philosophical structure may stand 
for centuries as a monument of human ingenuity, 
but unless it squares somehow with the important 
facts of the world that we know, it is without truth 
for us. Philosophy can with comparative ease 
take the isolated facts of consciousness and weld 
them into some kind of a system. It may be 
realistic, pluralistic, or idealistic. Yet the test 
of truth is not to be found in its cleverness or its 
intricacy, but simply in its agreement with the 
multiform variety of our world. Philosophy 
can without difficulty move from the particular 
to the general, but it has a grasp on truth only 
when it is able to apply its generalities to the 
particulars of fife. All systems of monistic 
thought have been assailed because they fail to 
"climb down" from some supreme reality after 
having "climbed up" from the particulars of 
daily experience — and the only truly critical 
test of speculative truth is just this ability to get 
back to facts. 

A philosophy of life must apply to life. A 
vitalistic conception of the world, even after it 
has passed through the inquisition of empiricism 
and realism, through the intricacies of a moral 



192 LIFE AS REALITY 

law and social conventions, through religion and 
even philosophy itself, is at best a fantastic con- 
struction without value or significance unless it 
applies to life. To declare reality is life without 
showing how such a theory affects life, is to come 
not a single step nearer reality. Things which 
philosophy must reach are the experiences which 
in their composite setting make up consciousness, 
and if the least reliance can be placed on life as a 
world- order our task is not completed until we 
have shown the significance of this reality to the 
things that we all deem of daily moment. 



We live in a world of external experience. We 
are assailed on every hand by the stern reality of 
a sense world that seems not of our own making. 
But its truth does not stop there. We know and 
feel the reality of life, and the truth of our sense 
world lies in our ability to transform matter into 
life. We believe in experience because it seems 
to express life. It seems to be a part of the world 
of mind and activity which we have early learned 
to associate with things which really "do some- 
thing" in an eternally active world. This was the 



THE MANY IN ONE 193 

meaning of experience found after a somewhat 
futile inquiry in search of the will- of -the- wisp 
of realism, but it is a conclusion signifying much. 

All this means that the life in which we partic- 
ipate is not slave, but master, of nature. All the 
progress of centuries is a quickening realization 
of this truth. Materialistic ages have not long 
endured, because materialism alone cannot give 
to humanity ideals of life, and it is through these 
ideals alone that the things of true moment are 
passed from generation to generation. Ideals 
are intangible, the values of life are intangible, 
but it is by just such things that we get glimpses 
of the permanent in our world. Experience can- 
not give it, materialism cannot give it, nor can 
the age bow down to the certainty of its sense- 
world and at the same time grasp enough of life 
to make a lasting impression on the underlying 
currents of history. 

In no true sense does the reality of life involve 
the unreality of experience. It does not look 
toward a mystic subjectivism like that of ancient 
India, where the sense-world is wholly destroyed. 
It is one thing to say that experience is not final, 
but leads back to life, and it is quite another 
thing to say that the experience is entirely unreal, 



194 LIFE AS REALITY 

that it is an illusion of an overwrought imagina- 
tion. The world of sense is more than this. It 
is more than the ever-nascent creation of the in- 
dividual consciousness, as non-materialists have 
been accused of believing. Subjectivism is a 
poor and threadbare excuse for a philosophy. 
Material existence is not a figment of the imagina- 
tion, nor does it come in and out of being accord- 
ing as some mind happens to be looking at it. 
Mind means nothing to the subjectivist unless 
it means some form of activity. This brings 
mind back to forms of life. The idea is an idea 
because it expresses a definite life purpose in- 
volved either in the thing itself or else in its per- 
ceiver. And thus is the Berkleian idealist and the 
subjectivist on the bedrock of reality. 

The sense-world itself involves reality in spite 
of the subtle arguments of the subjectivist, be- 
cause it is one way of expressing life. This is in 
itself a sufficient basis for our belief. We have 
no power to establish unquestionable standards 
of reality, by which we can say — this part of 
reality which is mind is good, that part which is 
sense is bad. We cannot even determine in- 
variant grades of reality, placing the truths of 
sense below those of mind, especially as a mental 



THE MANY IN ONE 195 

truth without being firmly rooted in sense expe- 
rience is impossible to find. We cannot repudiate 
the truths of experience even though we wish it; 
experience is real because in experience does life 
reveal the objects of the sense- world. Over them 
we are master, not because they are "mere mat- 
ter" and we are mind, but because we feel and 
know the life which lies back of our sense-world. 
Our ideals of life demand the proper valuation 
of experience. While we may not cast it aside 
with an ascetic denunciation, still we cannot 
mould the ideals of life after the sense form of 
reality. Life is more than human happiness on 
the level of a richer experience. The increase 
in human happiness, the accumulation of wealth 
and luxury, do not necessarily mark our increas- 
ing power of self-expression. The reality is 
life itself, — again we repeat, — and material goods 
and happiness are contributory only to this end. 
The things which the race has striven for are not 
these things of material worth. It has striven 
rather to transform these material values into 
life values. So far as we can shape the environ- 
ment that surrounds us do we become ourselves 
masters of our world. It is the balance between 
life and its controls, between self-expression and 



196 LIFE AS REALITY 

its defeat, that measures the progress of the world. 
Greece was great because her genius grasped the 
truth of life in nature, and our modern world 
can do no more. 



Our science bows to this truth. No modern 
biologist comes a grain nearer to the understand- 
ing of life as a reality than his Greek precursor. 
Aristotle is still a greater biologist than the 
present-day student. He knew nothing of cells 
and centrosomes, but he saw deeper into the 
significance of vital processes than the student 
of neurones and nuclei. Biology can only picture 
life. It can tell something about the outward 
form of vital processes, but nothing about their 
inner values. We do not go to the master of 
microscopic technique to find out what life is; 
we go rather to the man of action whose word 
is a vital stimulus to a plastic world. He has 
learned through living what life is and therefore 
he has felt, more than known, its reality. Science 
shows one phase of life — so much as can be 
objectified and then pigeonholed. But the ar- 
rangements and the pigeonholes are at best 
artificial copies. 



THE MANY IN ONE 197 

Science is great in its own sphere. Anything 
that can be made objective is fit material for its 
research. Even mental states can be reduced to 
law and order if we can only get some way to 
interpret them to another's consciousness. Science 
can make various activities of life simple and more 
intelligible, it can turn to practical uses a thousand 
phases of nature, making life richer and broader. 
It is this practical success for which we often 
worship science, blind to what it stands for in 
the fundamental reality of life. 

Above all, science can give men a wider field 
for self-expression. We value its achievements for 
their contribution to human well-being, and this 
in the end is simply the background of self- 
expression. No science is entirely theoretical; 
there is no such thing as a pure science except 
in the imagination of some pedant. Even astro- 
physics has worked its way into the fiber of our 
knowledge and has shed its own fight on many a 
human problem. Astronomy has its navigation, 
physics its engineering, chemistry its pharmacy, 
biology its economic entomology and a whole 
group of allied practices. The grasp of science 
on life is measured by its understanding of these 
practical issues of life. 



198 LIFE AS REALITY 

Nothing in the world is without the personal 
touch, not even abstract science. No one can 
quite squeeze out the human element in a mathe- 
matical formula. It will always assert itself 
at the most unexpected moment, because the 
formula is nonsense aside from the interpreting 
genius of man. Our scientific researches are 
methods of asserting personality. They express 
life because they express human activity. There 
is no scientist but who values his own efforts for 
more than their intrinsic results. He has a 
fatherly fondness for them. One astronomer, 
who had discovered a number of asteroids, left 
money in his will that their courses might be 
followed and their positions noted after his own 
life work was forgotten. Whatever we stamp 
with our own personal effort becomes illumined 
with a new light. It rises above the threshold 
and becomes real in a new sense, truer than ever 
before. 

Life values cannot be hammered out of scientific 
research. There is always the personal equation 
and the scientist is at least a human being like 
the rest of us. His work is thrown against the 
same emotional background as is common to us 
all. Men must express themselves, for this is our 



THE MANY IN ONE f 199 

mode of asserting reality, although the particular 
means to this final end are unessential. It may be 
determined by strange circumstances, but at 
bottom it is ourselves struggling for a "cause," 
for a field, for a world to conquer. We make our 
tasks one with ourselves, and in this union of 
life and effort we reach the true reality because 
it is a reality real for us. The task of the master 
of science is to understand and to make vital 
what is objective to us all. His own success is 
measured by his ability to throw himself into 
this task, and become one with it. He becomes 
great by destroying the barriers between the 
living and the dead. Insomuch does the world 
of nature become the world of life. 



All things of human interest that show activity 
and fife, show reality. But such a principle of 
values requires restatement and adjustment 
according to a world of moral colorings. Life is 
not without its duties and obligations, its dis- 
tinctions of right and wrong and the endless 
adjustment between " is " and c ' ought." On the 
plane of human life we have grasped the signifl- 



200 LIFE AS REALITY 

cance of moral ideals, and these must be made to 
square with our life activity. Morality without 
striving, without struggle and effort, is impossible, 
it is even meaningless, like a square without lines. 
But our everyday problem is to create a balance 
between self-expression, as the endless striving 
of our life, and the values of morality. It is a 
problem of adjustment in which the moral order 
is given a place in the reality. 

In a certain sense morality, so far as it embraces 
all effort and all will activity, embraces all reality. 
But in another sense it is partial and relative only. 
This is the sense in which morality becomes 
synonymous with a moral law. Nothing is more 
stifling and deadening than an objective law of 
conduct, capable of application under all circum- 
stances and under all conditions. Yet all the 
forms of the moral law that represent general 
principles of conduct are external to life. This 
was the result of our efforts to trace back various 
moral sanctions to some permanent foundation. 
But the only permanent basis for the law of 
life is life itself. We cannot reach law in conduct 
for the simple reason that a law can reach only 
what can be objectified, and life itself, the true 
reality of conduct, cannot be objectified. It 



THE MANY IN ONE 201 

cannot be squeezed into the ethical crucible and 
tested according to ready-made formulas. 

Life is more than a field for the justification 
of some moral law, just as experience is more 
than a field for the justification of some scientific 
hypothesis. This is all some moralists would 
make out of life — a kind of vitalized moral law. 
Yet unless the principles underlying our human 
action, whatever they are, can be made to stand 
for more than crude formulas of conduct, they 
have merely the feeblest grasp on reality. Our 
moral law was made for man, and not man for 
the moral law. Life is not justified by morality, 
whether it be defined in terms of universal happi- 
ness or the commandments of Jehovah. But 
morality, however we describe it, is justified by 
life. Life is the moral law. The law of life is 
merely life itself made articulate. 

Morality is the fullness of life- activity. Out of 
the deep reality of our own life comes the impera- 
tive to act. To this end we sacrifice all else, and 
it is right that we should, for in action lies reality. 
Nothing means so little as inaction. Our whole 
modern world is dynamic. Our creed is the creed 
of effort, of things done, and purposes hardening 
into deeds. The mediaeval world worshiped 



202 LIFE AS REALITY 

inaction, and all the currents and arteries of 
society became stagnant. The virtues of the 
monk and the nun might apply to some world 
beyond our own, but here on this human plane 
they are not virtues, but positive sins. The monk 
prayed for the salvation of his own soul and the 
souls of those upon whom he was dependent, 
but he broke contact with all that makes virtue 
possible. We have passed beyond this conception 
of virtue, but we still have a relic of it in our 
judgments of moral inaction. We still call a 
man good, even though he moves neither to the 
right nor the left — a kind of inanimate good- 
ness. 

The ordinary morality of our modern world 
is too much a matter of habit. We wear our 
morals as we do our ready-made clothes. Custom 
has established certain forms of activity, certain 
average dimensions, which we force on without 
regard to variations of structure. In a sense our 
age is too moral, too little individualistic, too 
ready to apply the normal of action to all situa- 
tions and all personalities. We have too few 
Byrons and Shelleys; too many preachers, too 
few "doers." We do not give life its true equa- 
tion; we judge too much by the external appear- 



THE MANY IN ONE 203 

ance, too little by the things for which actions 
stand to a struggling soul. 

But all this needs reservation, needs poise. 
The line between the good and the bad is just as 
pertinent, just as vital in a world of action as in 
a world of inaction. Self-expression needs its 
balance. There are others in the world that have 
life to express as well as ourselves, and hence 
arises morality in its true form. Respect for 
individuality, for self-expression struggling to 
become articulate, for life as we find it revealed 
in others — this is the true morality, but it is 
not the morality of law and system. Respect for 
the self-expression of other human beings, even 
of the dumb animals, is a broad enough morality 
for the most of us, unless we surrender our share 
of reality and allow ourselves to degenerate into 
a life of ease and inaction. Every circumstance 
is different, every human being is different, and 
therefore no formal law can ever adjust all our 
human relations. Even the golden rule cannot 
apply in every case, since we cannot treat others 
under all situations as we would ourselves, for 
the simple reason that they are not ourselves. 
The suicide prays that others shall kill him, but 
he is hardly moral in treating others in the same 



204 LIFE AS REALITY 

way. Our life is too complex, the lives of others 
are too complex, the whole background of social 
relations is too complex to carry about a ready- 
made moral law as we would a foot rule and apply 
it under all situations. The spirit of morality 
is not furthered by this, for that spirit is the 
respect of personality and individual self-expres- 
sion whenever it occurs. We have the right to 
demand this respect from others; we have also 
the right and the duty to extend it to others. 
This is as near as we can come to a moral law 
without sapping the vitality from life, but it is 
also as full a moral law as our powers can grasp. 



But all this requires the background of society. 
The evolution of a moral sense in the world has 
arisen as a response to our hunger for action. 
As a result society has established her institutions 
and her ideals to give poise to a personal morality 
which knows no law but its own caprice. Society 
cannot stamp out our impulse to activity with- 
out defeating her own ends. Accordingly her 
institutions exist to further our own individual 
expressions of reality and not to suppress them. 



THE MANY IN ONE 205 

We are all children of society. We are formed 
by social ideals and have our own individual 
self-expression colored by moral considerations 
which express not our will alone, but the will of 
the whole. Morality becomes truly great only 
when it applies to a life where self-expression is 
dedicated to social ends. 

The social order, whatever else it means, in- 
volves the expression of life and individuality. 
Otherwise, it is immoral and unreal. No con- 
ditions can operate to destroy this without at the 
same time destroying the permanent significance 
and therefore the reality of society. All the 
institutions which have grown up within the 
social order reflect whatever reality they possess 
by this light alone. Social responsibility is the 
recognition of the reality of another's life, just as 
we demand that same recognition and respect 
from the social body. The family, the state, 
cannot endure which does not hold as its most 
sacred treasure the individuality and personal 
expression of life of its members. Autonomy and 
death are identical in their contribution to 
reality. 

The exercise of self-expression and, therefore, 
morality in a social body requires distinct in- 



206 LIFE AS REALITY 

dividualifcy. This is the all-important lesson of 
contemporary social and political problems. We 
cannot have true social morality unless it rests 
firmly on individual morality. The entire fabric 
of society requires this. But individual morality 
is possible only when we allow the fullest self- 
expression in others. Society is an organization 
of separate wills, cooperating for their mutual 
good. Morality without activity, without self- 
expression, without individuality, is impossible. 
Society must, therefore, preserve the personal 
activity of its separate units, not only for the 
maximum efficiency of its members, but also 
for the evolution of its own moral sense. 

This aspect of life — the individuality of the 
members of society — ought not to be passed over 
with merely a hasty glance. Men can do more, 
can stand for a fuller self-expression, when acting 
under the stimulus of cooperation than when 
acting alone. This much it is nonsense to deny. 
As a result our social evolution has gradually 
embraced various cooperative agencies, such as 
are involved in urban life, government administra- 
tion of the law, and the like, which lead to a 
larger range of self-expression. These agencies 
have brought our various human activities into 



THE MANY IN ONE 207 

closer connection. The fabric of society has 
become more densely woven. As a result, we 
have forgotten that this tendency to social rather 
than individual expression should be mastered 
and not our master. The socialists, who express 
in their deadly creed the suppression of the single 
individual, would allow these tendencies to so 
supplant and undermine our primitive passion 
for self-expression that the vital impulse of life 
is lost to us as human beings. We may perhaps 
live easier, after a kind of toad-like fashion, but 
where the ideals of life are quenched there is 
not the summum bonum of an earthly Paradise. 

The most vital, most consequential problem of 
our present-day social and political life is the 
cultivation of a distinguishing sense between 
social cooperation and socialism. The one makes 
possible a larger life; the other is deadly. Our 
social and political problems are eminently vital; 
we have outgrown all previous patterns by which 
to deal with them. In the day of sparse rural 
population the problem was not of great moment 
because the farmer breathed individuality and 
independence from the soil. The conditions of 
life made men. And the whole body-politic 
was healthy because it preserved individuality 



208 LIFE AS REALITY 

at any cost and strove to give the largest available 
chance for self-expression consistent with limited 
opportunities. But now, with the continued 
concentration of population, the whole setting 
becomes so new, yet so complex, that it some- 
times seems as if the old ideals of independence, 
individuality, and the supreme consequence of 
personal lif e had been relegated to the past. Not 
so. Life, in whatever form it shows itself, is 
just as precious, just as real and just as much the 
supreme value as in simpler states of society. 
And for life we simply must have the fullest 
self-expression and the largest amplitude for 
individuality. 



Religion has always stood back of social in- 
stitutions and moral conventions. Society de- 
mands a permanence for its ideals, and this is 
best found in the aspirations of the religious 
experience. As the faith in a divine law, religion 
is in a position to supply a ground to our human 
law. But religion means far more than this. 
It means in the end a philosophy of life. Two 
tendencies are observable in the recent history 
of religion: one is a tendency to eliminate purely 



THE MANY IN ONE 209 

objective elements and the other is an equally 
marked tendency to emphasize the underlying 
values of personal feeling as an expression of 
reality. Prayer, sacrifice, ritual, even dogma, 
gradually disappear before an enlightening crit- 
icism. In their stead religion grows more sub- 
jective. In its evolution it tends to appeal more 
to the individual consciousness than to the col- 
lective belief; it leaves its external forms to a 
bygone past and takes refuge in the impregnable 
citadel of human feeling. This cannot be made 
objective so as to give a concept of the Deity, as 
we found in the analysis of the religious feeling, 
but yet it can at least retain its position as an 
immediate response of our life to the unfathom- 
able richness of the world in which life expresses 
itself. In this sense it represents one of the 
ultimate values of life. 

The value of religion in our world is just 
this love of life. It is vital and significant only 
so long as it is a means for the self-expression 
of human individuality. It becomes dead and 
therefore unreal the moment it ceases to operate 
as a force in this work-a-day world. Men demand 
of their religion a practical stimulus; they demand 
that religion throw its light on the problems of an 



210 LIFE AS REALITY 

eternally dynamic and moving world, and vindi- 
cate its high mission to men by its practical 
deeds. The reality of a religion is its oneness 
with life, its power of showing itself real in a 
world where the only reality is life. 

This is why creeds spring up and then die down. 
Eeligion easily degenerates into formalism and 
loses contact with a living reality. Social and 
intellectual conditions continually change and 
religion tends to take the form of a fixed set of 
dogmas and is, therefore, incapable of changing 
with the new order without losing the confidence 
of its adherents. As a result a new sect arises 
which is better fitted to cope with the problems 
of human lif e in this newer form. The tendency 
of religion is to become more at one with life as it 
is revealed to us through living, and one side of 
this tendency is its practical contact with every- 
day problems. The other side is its tolerance. 
Reality shows itself in many forms, in many lives. 
That it should be the same under all conditions 
is improbable, perhaps impossible. We demand 
self-expression as our dearest birthright, and we 
cannot permit religion to curb life for its own 
purposes. We cannot allow the outgrown forms 
of dogma and ritual, of tradition and superstition, 



THE MANY IN ONE 211 

to lay their withering hand on what is most 
precious to life, its individuality, its self-expres- 
sion. Each man has his own religion because 
he has his own feeling for reality. As such it is 
answerable only to himself, for the simple reason 
that it is real only to himself. Our western world 
is not religious in the ritualistic sense. In this 
lies its salvation. It has never felt the deadening 
influence of a state religion, it has never had to 
win its freedom through malice and hatred and 
slaughter. We have too much to do to be con- 
cerned with formal religion. We have too close 
a contact with reality to require its interpretation 
in terms of an external cult. 

Religion as an external form of worship is 
passing away. There are many who regret it, 
there are others who welcome it. But it is 
passing. There will always be the human feeling 
because that is a part of reality, but the moulds 
into which it is cast by our traditional faith and 
dogma are disappearing through their own lack 
of contact with reality. The greatest bulwark 
of an outworn faith, the childish awe for a super- 
natural agency, is losing its power of appeal. 
Science is assailing superstition on the one side by 
substituting an intelligible universe for a world of 



212 LIFE AS REALITY 

supernatural play, and our simple everyday man 
of affairs is assailing it on the other by making us 
believe in a practical, insistent reality. Those 
who are too busy with life as they find it revealed 
in their own consciousness are too busy for the 
external forms of a dead religion. 

Religion is also losing its effectiveness because 
of the lessening power of its preachers. Men are 
coming gradually to recognize other fields of 
service where they can come into closer contact 
with life — with reality — than from the pulpit. 
Medicine offers an increasing scope of activity, 
technical and sociological. The field of political 
achievement is crying for men of power; new 
professions are springing up that demand a deep 
insight into human nature, and a wide and com- 
prehensive knowledge of human affairs. All 
these have far more insistent and pertinent 
problems than are offered in the ministry. The 
world demands action, not preaching. It looks 
away from the men that teach to the men that 
do. It weighs achievement by its meaning in 
the self-expression of life. 

Beyond religion stands the reality of life itself. 
Beyond the vague forms of a traditional faith 
with its moral code and its dogma stands a 



THE MANY IN ONE 213 

philosophy of life. Religion is crumbling, but 
philosophy as a working force in the world is 
rising upon its fragments. When the dogma 
and the superstition is removed from religion 
there remains the feeling for life and its self- 
expression. These have not lost their usefulness 
in a work-a-day world. On the contrary they 
are the germplasm of a new force. Religion can 
do more in the world, stripped of its dogma; but 
then it ceases to be religion and becomes a 
philosophy of life. With this change the moral 
problems of the world stand out clearly of them- 
selves. If morality is losing its religious support 
it must learn to stand by itself and alone. This 
is the duty of a philosophy of life — to show the 
self-sufficiency, the independent value, of a 
simple morality of social obligation built on an 
underlying respect for individual self-expression. 
This needs no higher criticism, no gospel of 
salvation. It needs only the belief in human 
effort and the final reality of life. 

navra pa ? — all things flow, — said an old Ephe- 
sian, looking out on a world of change and con- 
flict. But Heraclitus saw too that the flow itself 
was permanent, although its forms were fleeting. 
The things that make our world worth while 



214 LIFE AS REALITY 

come to us as changing values. Our ideals, our 
"causes," our things of great personal moment 
hardly outlast the effort that creates them, for 
life reveals itself as activity and not as completed 
purposes. The reality is the moral struggle, the 
insistent effort to give articulate form to what 
we only vaguely feel. It is the impulse to act our 
individuality that is real, because it is life. 



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